Unthreaded #32

The CA server has been a bit balky this week, so I want to see if the volume of info on unthreaded #31 (768 comments) might have something to do with it by starting a new thread to see if the issues abate.

Also per John A, can I recommend that contributors to Unthreaded conversations use the message board also?

539 Comments

I am hoping someone can help me understand the new list of data removed file. I noticed that Crater Lake is no longer on the whole record omitted list. And to be honest I do not completely understand the explination,

However, that list had to be shortened (by almost a factor of 2) when we switched to the newest USHCN file, since many of these data were no longer present, and our program was not designed to remove non-existing data. We decided to remove all USHCN data from that list, considering the scrutiny that these data received by NOAA

I checked USHCN and found Crater Lake there, however, am not sure I was actually looking at the latest incantation of the USCHN file. Does this mean that Crater Lake is now being used in gistemp?

I also have one other question, as I am statistically illiterate. The graph in the enclosed link shows the temperature record current vs. non cleaned. Dr. Hansen states,

Removal of these data has no significant effect on our analysis

Question- if there is not a statistically significant reason to do an adjustment, what justification is there for still doing the adjustment?
Thank you for any help.

This chapter summarises current knowledge of the global carbon cycle, with special reference to the fate of fossil fuel CO2 and the factors that influence the uptake or release of CO2 by the oceans and land. These factors include atmospheric CO2 concentration itself, the naturally variable climate, likely climate changes caused by increasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases, changes in ocean circulation and biology, fertilising effects of atmospheric CO2 and nitrogen deposition, and direct human actions such as land conversion (from native vegetation to agriculture and vice versa), fire suppression and land management for carbon storage as provided for by the Kyoto Protocol (IPCC, 2000a). Any changes in the function of either the terrestrial biosphere or the ocean – whether intended or not – could potentially have significant effects, manifested within years to decades, on the fraction of fossil fuel CO2 that stays in the atmosphere. This perspective has driven a great deal of research during the years since the IPCC WGI Second Assessment report (IPCC, 1996) (hereafter SAR) (Schimel et al., 1996; Melillo et al., 1996; Denman et al., 1996). Some major areas where advances have been made since the SAR are as follows:

Forgot to ask earlier, the mistake in median computation, found by Michael Smith, is it also affecting the SPM figure 2? Or is there another explanation for highly asymmetric uncertainty estimate for cloud albedo effect?

Yes, I know and I’ve read it. But when you start reading the source literature, you quickly realize that the IPCC report is a very biased view of the actual state of the science. They carefully avoid the difficult questions, they ignore conflicting data, they make it sound like it’s all certain and settled. For example, you find very little on the interaction of marine life with CO2, yet it’s a vibrant field with new discoveries every day that challenge current widsom. Why is it that people like Mick Follows, or Taro Takahashi are not amongst the authors? Follows’ work is not even cited. Instead, the lead authors include Gruber and Le Quéré, who are vocal AGWers (LeQuéré has posted at RC). Takahashi has done some very good work on the CO2 fluxes between ocean and atmosphere, which is cited by IPCC, but what I find fascinating is that in his paper he uses the word “anthropogenic” only once near the end, and it sounds like he felt obligated to pay lip service to the reigning theory. In the entire paper, he is really quite agnostic about where the CO2 comes from.

I’m a scientist and I’ve written and read tons of papers, review papers, grant applications, reports, patents, etc. Reading the IPCC report just makes me angry (then I post here and vent on Curry or JEG, and get snipped by Steve…). I can’t imagine that there are not many scientists out there who don’t feel the same. To anyone here who wants to know what’s really going on in climate science, don’t read the IPCC report. There are good review articles in scientific journals. Avoid people too closely associated with “the team”. Anyone who has posted at RC is not to be trusted IMO. They make a mockery of science.

To anyone here who wants to know what’s really going on in climate science, don’t read the IPCC report. There are good review articles in scientific journals. Avoid people too closely associated with “the team”. Anyone who has posted at RC is not to be trusted IMO. They make a mockery of science.

I agree with your assessment of the IPCC and RC, but given their predilections to market AGW mitigation and taking that into consideration, I judge that using them as sources of reviews of papers that support or that they deem supports immediate AGW mitigation can provide a decent start to getting into the more detailed literature. A big part of reading the IPCC (for understanding and insights) is to account for the nuanced meanings that derive from their word smithing of a stated view on climate science.

I once wrote the editor of my newspaper to defend some comments made in the Sunday Magazine section from criticisms of them made by the paper’s ombudsman. My point was that while I did not agree much with the views of the magazine, in general, or the comments in this case, it was all in line with the magazine’s general POV and that their magazine is where I went to hear the views from the “other” side and the occasional laugh that it provided.

I save my anger for my sports teams who are not doing so well. Maybe your hockey team is doing well?

Maybe that’s the problem. The Canadiens are doing really well this year…

Nevertheless, Google Scholar is a wonderful tool. Wish I had had that before… I used to spend countless hours at the university library, browsing through journals, making photocopies. Doing a literature search was a time consuming task. Now you can do it from the comfort of your home, and quickly find papers that you would never have been aware of. Since they also tell you who cited it, you can follow paths of research downwards, something that was really hard before, since you had to go to the citation index, and look year after year for citations…The IPCC maybe a good place to start for a lay person not used to reading scientific papers, but then that’s the danger because they don’t tell you everything. It’s not the state of the science, it’s a particular view of the science. A lot of relevant papers are just not cited or mentioned.

A last word about anger. I know the academic crowd, I was part of it. Whatever Judith says about living on genteel salaries and so on, these people do not have the right to be arrogant or condescending towards the general public who ask relevant questions. If people have political opinions, it’s their right. When you are paid to do science, especially with public funds, then just do that the best you can, and try to live up to what is expected from you. The problem with academics is that they’re not used to being accountable for what they do. So they may come to think that they’re some kind of superior species, whereas it’s just that what they do is usually of no interest whatsoever for anybody but their little circle of colleagues. But climate science is not just another grant application where you can just bulls… your way to obtaining it. This is for real, it’s real policies affecting the lives of everyone. If someone like Mann comes up with a flawed study, you can’t just hide behind some “I don’t comment on other scientists behavior” policy, all because it might affect your own success at publishing papers and getting grants. There’s a bigger responsibility here. That’s why I think that the IPCC should not be left to unpaid academics. They should hire a bunch of experts, and pay them a good salary, but then require that no stone be left unturned.

There is no question that the rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is due to anthropogenic effects. The lower Carbon 14 to C12+C13 ratios from fossil fuels give a distinctive signature to CO2 arising from ‘old’ deposits of carbon vs current and well mixed sources of carbon.

In fact, we are putting so much lower isotope carbons in the atmosphere, that it is important to take into account this fact when doing Carbon-14 dating. It is called the ‘Seuss’ effect:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suess_effect

With this isotopic evidence and the simple order of magnitude equivalence between what we are burning and the increasing levels in the atmosphere, it makes this the most rock-solid part of the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. If you wish to question the theory, it would be a better use of your time to attack the weaker parts – namely historical surface temperature records.

I was just reading a book on pre-columbian American history, an old one, The Discovery of America by John Fiske, written at the end of the 19th century, and came across this passage regarding navigation between Greenland and Iceland:

…from the testimaony of Ivar Bardsen, steward fo the Gardar bishopric in the latter half of the fourteenth century … According to Barsen there had long been a downward drifting of ice from the north and a consequent accumulation of bergs and floes upon the eastern coast of Greenland, insomuch that the customary route formerly followed by ships coming from Iceland was no longer safe, and a more southerly route had been generally adopted.
– Bardsen. Descriptio Geoelandia

Fiske also asserts that Greenland exported cattle during the time of the Viking colony there, “in 1855, there were in Greenland 30 to 40 head of horned cattle, but in the ancient colony, with a population not exceeding 6000 persons, ‘herds of cattle were kept wich even yielded produce for exportation to Europe.'”

I know that the MWP in Greenland is well established, but what amazes me is how long, and to what extent, the media went to deny even that. I remember maybe two years ago hearing a story on NPR that patiently explained how the colony in Greenland failed due to overgrazing, and how Greenland was named as a trick to get people to settle there. However, if you follow the records of the Vikings, they were very literal namers, grapes? Vinland, Trees, the Danish equivalent of Woodland, they even called Labrador (we think) “Flat slate land.” This stuff just creates skeptics.

re #11 ejramberg: perhaps you should look at the relative effect of your postulation. Instead of relying on Wikipedia (“fakapedia”), maybe you should do some independent research to draw an intelligent, independent conclusion. Try, for example, reading this relevant article: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0802/0802.3130.pdf

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a strong supporter of AGW science. When I say the surface temperature record is the weakest link, I still believe it is a strong link indeed. Investigations of the robustness of the temperature record with regard to siting, by John V on this web site, are pretty convincing.

Re: #14

This is a ridiculous paper. It claims to make a model that denies anthropogenic contributions to the increase of CO2, but admits “It suffices that the human emissions are fed directly to the atmosphere…”,
Let me reiterate: the source of rising CO2 is not a weak point of the theory. What’s next – denying that the CO2 level is rising?

Fagan’s “The Great Warming” appears rather politically incorrect. I actually agree with a lot of the summary as seen in Amazon, but the reason it is politically incorrect is beause the line from Realclimate is that the MWP was confined to Nothern Europe and Greenland. All this stuff about crop failures in Central America and California, this makes Fagan a skeptic of the IPCC’s paleoclimatology. If you accept Fagan’s view on the effects of the MWP, then I assume you agree that the hockey stick is bunk? In fact, if you accept Fagan’s views, how can you accept that it is currently that warm today, since a lot of these things do not appear to be happening yet, but rather are in store for us?

If you accept “The Great Warming”, that puts you right, smack dab, in the middle of the mainstream view of this site.

If you accept “The Great Warming”, that puts you right, smack dab, in the middle of the mainstream view of this site.

None of this is ideological for me … I am truly curious. Besides, no one really knows the temps. that prevailed during the MWP. Perhaps it was just a time of great calm … particularly looking back through the LIA that roughly followed … which was a time of great climate unrest … mostly having to do with ocean currents and high/low pressure systems over Greenland and the Azores.

The thing about the MWP and the LIA is that they have really been miscast in the debate. Having a so called MWP does not disprove AGW. Rather, what it shows is that climate can and does shift … suddenly … and with horrific consequences. As somebody said, climate is an unpredictable beast … and we are poking it with a stick.

At the end of the day, to dismiss AGW … you have to dismiss physics … you have to dismiss the ice from Vostock and what it clearly tells us … and you would have to dismiss the history of climate change and variability.

#22 Abbot Crumb: “…just a time of great calm”; “…great climate unrest”; “… suddenly … and with horrific consequences”. I can’t help but comment that you rely on anthropomorphism to describe physical phenomena. Maybe you can devine the science by studying crystals?

It tells us two things:
1. The climate has warmed and cooled over much greater ranges than we see now, all before humans started producing much CO2,
2. The temperatures rose first, and THEN the CO2 started to rise. The arrow of causality is pointing from temperature to CO2.

The IPCC assumptions about there being only three reservoirs of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere are in gross error, because they neglect the mammoth role of the lithosphere by rolling it into the other three mentioned reservoirs. Erosional processes alone are redepositing and sequestering massive amounts of carbon dioxide from limestone, cement, and assorted other inorganics and into the lithosphere exclusive of biological processes. Just ask yourself how much carbon dioxide there is in the lithosphere, and how much of that carbon dioxide in the lithosphere is in flux by organic and inorganic processes?

Yes, this sounds like solid evidence, but only until you start looking at it from the other end. Here’s what I mean:

There’s nothing to argue about human emissions of CO2. There’s nothing to argue about the fact that CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. But does one lead to the other? At first sight, it seems obvious, but remember, correlation does not mean causation.

Just imagine if there was another reason for CO2 to increase. For example, let’s say the ocean for some reason decides it does not want to take up CO2 any more. But we keep pumping it, so it will accumulate. Or say the ocean decides it only takes up half of what we’re pumping into the atmosphere. So we find anthropogenic carbon in the ocean, we find it in the atmosphere, etc. Of course, because it exists, it’s got to go where all the other CO2 goes. So the fact that you find “anthropogenic” carbon in the ocean is a proof of nothing, if only that CO2 moves around, and that some of it is anthropogenic in origin. See, it’s an empty argument.

What you’ve really got to prove is that by virtue of the laws of physics (and chemistry, and biology), the amount of CO2 we’re emitting will be partly absorbed here or there, but most of it will stay in the atmosphere and accumulate.

Hence the models. But I’ll tell you, so far I haven’t found in the scientific literature a clear, quantitative exposition of the CO2 buildup that accounts for all observations, and for all bio-geophysical phenomena.

One big problem is that the CO2 uptake is quite variable, whereas human emissions just increase monotonically. Moreover, half of the CO2 is taken up, on average. Why? So you can easily model the big picture (monotonic increase), but not the details.

So in the end, everything that is cited as “proof” that human emissions are responsible for the CO2 buildup, is only proof that (1) there are human emissions, and (2) there is a buildup, but not of any causative link between the two.

What I’ve done, is show that you can explain the buildup with a simple model where the oceans capacity to store CO2 responds to temperature. It turns out that it also explains the fluctuations in uptake. I don’t know why. I just know it works, and it works well. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But if it’s for real, then it turns the perspective upside down. The CO2 buildup is now the result of warming, not the cause. All the observations still fit, only the causation relationship is reversed. That’s the amazing thing. You can build a coherent picture where humans emit CO2 that then warms everything. But you can build a similarly coherent picture where warming induces a CO2 buildup.

So, to my own amazement, I have now come to think that the link between CO2 buildup and human emissions IS indeed the weakest link in AGW.

I know it’s ridiculous. But is it wrong? I mean, the result? My point is that I have a simple phenomenological model that explains more observations than more complex ones. Forget the speculations about why it is so. Maybe I’m wrong. But the result is there. You’ve got to explain it. Can you? Have you got a better model?

I do dismiss the ice from Vostok. That’s because there is contradictory evidence, from stomatal index reconstructions. Both can’t be right. I’ve chosen my camp.

So can we talk feedbacks now? That’s wonderful, because if you accept that more warming induces more outgassing of the oceans (viewed as a feedback), then you just admitted that my point of view makes sense. All you need now is accept that CO2 sensitivity is quite low (not an implausible thing), and all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

I repeatedly hear that the Vostok Cores are some kind of un-arguable source of hard fact. This is not the case.

In order to understand the nature of the data you need to know something about the source of the data.

The reason why the cores do not tell us anything about the present atmosphere is because the top several hundred meters of it is not ice but snow. And that snow interacts with atmosphere. That fact should make it clear that any measurement represents not a single point in time but an average over the time between when the snow was deposited and when it compacted sufficiently to “seal” in air pockets.

Another fact to consider about ice data is that these air pockets are not completely sealed. Diffusion of gas through ice crystals is known to happen. It likely is pressure and temperature sensitive, but it never stops. We don’t have a really good handle on what diffusion rates are, but that doesn’t mean its non-existent.

Further consider what occurs when ice from a depth of several thousand meters is raised to surface, shipped and stored. The air trapped in pockets was under tremendous pressure at its original depth from which is was sampled. Descriptions of the core when first sampled confirm that these pockets are initially surrounded by fractures when raised to the surface. What do you suppose occurs with the gas inside? Would their internal pressures not be affected? Would partial pressures of individual gases all act the same during de-pressurization?

Finally, recent research has confirmed that bacteria are present throughout the ice cores and that some of these bacteria are active at temperatures as low as -20C. While this might be warm on the surface at Vostok, it is well within the range that occurs within ice itself. Both anaerobic and aerobic species are present. What effects these bacteria have on O2 and CO2 in ice air pockets is not known, but their presence does make the data from these cores look too good as some kind of uncorrupted time capsule from the past.

I could go on a say something about diesel fuel use as drill lubricant, but that would be overkill.

What I’ve done, is show that you can explain the buildup with a simple model where the oceans capacity to store CO2 responds to temperature. It turns out that it also explains the fluctuations in uptake.

Apparently:
“The PETM is accompanied by a mass extinction of 35-50% of benthic foramanifera (especially in deeper waters) over the course of ~1000 years – the group suffering more than during the dinosaur-slaying K-T excinction. Contrarily, planktonic foramanifera diversified, and dinoflagellates bloome. Success was also enjoyed by the mammals, who radiated profusely around this time.”

The assumption is the higher temps driven by GHGs caused the mass extinctions. However, what if the extinctions were caused by something else which then triggered a build up in CO2 due to the loss of CO2 consuming species? A similar die off of plankton in recent years could be the root cause of the CO2 build up. See http://www.i-sis.org.uk/AbruptPlanktonShifts.php
I am simply speculating at this point. It is very difficult to determine cause an effect and so much of science today is driven by the *assumption* that CO2 is causing the temperature changes and everything affected by the changes.

Here is a comment that I orginally posted on JunkScience on Feb 24. Everytime I post it, I keep adding more comments. My working title is “Fatal Flaws in GCM’s: Carbon Dioxide and Water in Real Air. There is one caveat: I don’t know how the climate modelling guys handle the concentation of CO2 in their so-called computer modelling experiments. However, Ipreety sure I am right about this. When this little comment spreads thru web, there is going to be a lot of red face in NYC.

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere as determined by analysis of ambient air at Mauna Loa is reported for “Standard Dry Air” which is air at 273.16 K and 1 atm pressure and is comprised of nitrogen, oxygen and the inert gases. These are the reference conditions always used for reporting the composition of the atmosphere based on analysis of ambient air at a particular site by various methods. The value is only valid for Mauna Loa and bear no relationship to the concentration of CO2 in “Real Air” at any other site. “Real Air” is term for ambient air at the intake ports of air seperation plants and is used in the HVAC industries.

In general, the composition and physical properties of real air are quite site specfic, variable and depend primarily on elevation and fluctuating temperature, air pressure, and absolute humidity and to a lessor extent on the seasons and weather, site surface and geophysical features (e.g., ocean, mountains, desert, forests, cropland, urbanization, etc) and on biological and human activities. Clouds and the temperature of water bodies will also effect the concentration of CO2 in the air.

For example, if standard dry air is heated to 30 deg C the mole number declines by about 10% but the relative ratios of the gases in the real air will remain about the same. This is origin of the phase “well-mixed gases in the troposphere.”

Standard dry air has 388 ml of pure CO2/cu. meter. At 30 deg C this value drops to 350 ml/cu. meter. If the air were to become saturated with water vapor (ca, 4% by volume), the amount of CO2 declines to about 336 ml/cu. meter

Air pressure declines about 1 psi per 2000 ft increase in elevation. This would lower the density of the air and thus the absolute amount of the gases per unit volume. However, air temperature drops about 6 deg C per 2000 ft. increase in elevation. This would increase the density of air. Thus the absolute amount of the gases per unit volume of air becomes a complex function of these variables as well as the above mentioned fluctuating temperature, air pressure and absolute humidity.

Since clouds have a high surface area and CO2 is quite soluble in water, the amount of CO2 in the air will be altered and depend the cloud density, i.e, the amount of water per cubic meter. If the clouds move into warmer air and dissipate, the CO2 will be released to air. If the clouds move into cooler air and rain is formed, the CO2 will be transported to the surface and its disposition will depend on that surface. Over the oceans the CO2 will mix in the water quickly. Over the land, however, the nature of the surface will effect whether the CO2 is retained in the water (e.g., porous soil) or released back to the air (for example, hot concrete or rocks or plant leaves, etc).

Over water the amount of CO2 in the air will be influenced by the temperature of the upper layers. The solubility of CO2 declines rapidly with increasing water temperature and can be about 60% lower in water at 30 deg C than water at 0 deg C. As warm tropical water moves to the poles, its temperature slowly drops and by the time it reaches the polar region the water temperature can be about 0 deg C, and can hold about 2.5 times as much CO2 as the warm tropical water. How much CO2 is absorbed will depend on air presssure, wind, wave action, salinity and biological activity, etc.

Biological activity will affect the amount of CO2 in the air. In particular, green plants from algae to big trees fix CO2 in the daytime, but all animals and non-photosynthetic microbes respire. At night all plants and animals respire.

Human activities will affect local and regional concentration of CO2 in the air. For example, in Southern California, the concentration of CO2 will start to increase at sunrise, continue to rise throughout the workday, and will be the highest at the end of the evening rush hour after which the concentration of CO2 will start to decline. How the CO2 disperses will depend on the weather (e.g., movement of highs and lows into and out of the region) and the direction of the wind(s). Presence of large airports will certainly alter the local concentration of CO2.

What all of the above boils down to is this: There is no uniform spatial and temporal distribution of CO2 in real or ambient air as expessed in an absolute amount per unit volume of air. Climate models would probably give better results if the absolute amount of CO2 per unit volume is used (e.g., milligrams or millimoles/cubic meter) and some method for estimating the above mentioned spatial and temporal distribution(s). However, the fluctuating concentration of CO2 would be most prevalent in the lower troposphere, and might not apply in upper troposphere above ca. 40,000 ft.

Since standard dry air exists at no site on the surface of the earth, any “computer modeling experiments” using a value of 388 ppmv will give erroneous results.

Commercial and military aviation might alter the concentration of CO2 and H20 in the upper troposphere between 30,000 and 40,000 ft.

Real air has one very important property and that is this: Real air always has water vapor. There is no site on Mother Earth where the humidity is zero.

I forgot to mention this. I first tried to post my comment on RealClimite to shake up Gavin, but the spam blocker whacked it. I parsed the text word by word to find the offrensive term or phrase, but couldn’t find any. I changed “fluctuating” to “varying” but it made no difference. Some words I spelled backwards or hyphenated, and it still made no difference. So I gave up.

However, I suspect Gavin would have whacked it anyway because it raises too many questions which are difficult to refute such as, “Where on this earth do the conditions for standard dry air apply?” Answer: Nowhere!

The climate calculations could not be done unless there is a uniform distribution of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and this is clearly not the case. Although water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, it is not uniformly distributed throughout the atmosphere. To get around this problem, the IPCC chose to classify it as feedback factor. This is nonsense. Water vapor is self-priming and does not need any help from CO2.

It is not to reject physics to believe that an experiment that works in a glass tube cannot be directly applied to a chaotic system as large as the climate of this planet. I am really starting to see Steve’s point about the uselessness of discussions which stray from particular scientific papers.

I’ve always found it odd the idea that CO2 is well-mixed in the atmosphere since most of it must be concentrated near ground level in order for nature to work. It is mainly produced at ground level, is heavier than air and is dissolved in rainwater and in the sea. All of which points to the natural concentration being predominantly near the surface. Where does the anthropogenic stuff go? It goes exactly where we see the soot going – either back to earth immediately or carried away by the wind to be rained down somewhere else. And when it lands, either it is used up by plants or it dissolves in water or snow. The CO2 at higher levels is likely dumped there by aircraft. Eli’s NASA CO2 graph indeed showed (to me at least) that the CO2 at 38,000 feet was concentrated near tourist spots. The soot landing on the Arctic is likely more of a problem than CO2, as it seems it’s satellite pattern matches the Arctic warming pattern pretty well.

Abbot Crumb, what on earth makes you (and others) think that near agreement between the sattelites measuring one thing and surface stations measuring another means they’ve been independently validated?

There should be more (faster) warming aloft according to models, not less (which they still do show), and at any rate its only validating for the first 30 years of a 100 year+ record. This has been endlessly dealt with over and over here. The surface record remains dubious. You can’t wish the facts away.

But I agree that this certainly isn’t the weakest link. The weakest links are all in the models, in one way or another.

Sniff…sniff…I smell sock puppets…there are at least two and possibly more people in this thread that are so stylistically similar they have to be the same person…and we know who that is from past “discussions.”

#44. MArk . Thank you. Mark is quite right. Attribution of CO2 levels to human activity is not an issue that I find problematic and I would prefer that people move such discussion to the BB as MArk R has facilitated.

Since the satellite data only exists since 1976 or so (some even more recent) we can only assess agreement over that interval. It has been documented on this site in exhaustive detail that many of the adjustments to the historical temperature records have been downward (the records were made cooler) for past data (say before 1950). This does not show up in any comparison of 1976 to present. Thus we can’t say they agree that well.

Hansen’s surface temp showed 2007 as the “second warmest on record”, the satellite data showed it as one of the coldest in the past decade. I don’t care how many graphs from Wikipedia you produce, explain that please. But not to me, I am tired of discussions with warmies who are blind to evidence and deaf to reason.

Those arguments about feedback are, I’m afraid, weak and unconvincing attempts to avoid admitting that the causality arrow is not in your favor.

Then you cannot possibly believe in past climate change, because that is the only credible explanation for how the glacial and interglacial cycles ebbed and flowed. Changes lead to feedbacks and amplifications that lead to other changes: sun, gas, snow, water, carbon cycle fluctuations, etc. In short, you basically have to dismiss substantial amounts of physics and earth sciences and history to stand by your statement.

Those arguments about feedback are, I’m afraid, weak and unconvincing attempts to avoid admitting that the causality arrow is not in your favor.

More simply stated, causality is almost never (nay, absolutely never) linear in the climate arena … or in any earth science arena for the matter. This point is so simple and beyond dispute that it really does not require any further discussion.

Um, Milankovitch? I’m just saying…How do you quantify the forcings going in and out of an interglacial to test sentivity?

Here’s one response on the warm side of the cycle: you have approximately 800 years of small amounts of increased sun light falling … leading the carbon cycle. Then you have another approximate 4,500 odd years of increased warmth that simply cannot be explained by the initial small increase in insolation. The balance of the warming can only be explained by feedbacks … which range from fluctuations in the carbon cycle to decreased albedo. And, we know that the earth can warm and cool quite significantly as a result of the cycle … and the passing of certain tipping points … from which there is an unstoppable movement from one state to another.

Milankovitch cycles were the primary trigger for climate changes in and out ice ages. This is not disputed. However, some people have argued that Milankovitch cycles in themselves could not cause such a climate shift without CO2 feedback. My understanding is this is not an opinion shared by everyone and that some people do believe that the orbital forcing are more than enough to explain the ice ages and that the CO2 positive feedback hypothesis is only favoured by people that are looking to validate the AGW hypothesis.

In other words, the relationship between CO2 and ice ages is not a fact -> it is an opinion.

55 Abbot
Oh, Abbot, you are deliberately mis-reading what I said. Nowhere did I say that there are no feedbacks.
What I said was that using feedback too argue against the arrow of causality was very weak and unconvincing.
If one applies the brakes and the car starts to decelerate, it is sophistry to suggest, even in the presence of feedback whereby the deceleration increases the braking effect, that it is the deceleration which caused the braking.

More simply stated, causality is almost never (nay, absolutely never) linear in the climate arena

That explains a lot, bristlecone teleconnection for example. But in material world non-linear causality is equivalent to travel back in time. Wait a minute, AGW started century before CO2 emissions rise!

In spite of some blatant mistakes, Rahmstorf manages to make a good case of the AGW theory but Lindzen’s replies are demolishing. Nothing especially new in the whole discussion but, as a layman, I noted several remarkable things:

1) At last I see a member of the AGW ‘establishment’ explicitly accepting that we have already experienced a GHG forcing equivalent to roughly 3/4 of 2xCO2 (2.6 W/m2 vs 3.7 W/m2)…for a meagre transient warming of only 0.7 C. I recall that some time ago Annan would not accept this and also I perfectly remember how several Real Climate fans here, at Motl’s blog and elsewhere mocked those buying Lindzen’s argument on the basis that ln (35) = 43 [not 75]. Hopefully these people will read Lindzen (and the IPCC) more carefully and ‘move on’ with Rahmstorf.

2) As Lindzen explains, this scientific discussing could have hardly taken place outside of the climate science sphere. It turns out that both authors were invited to write a chapter each for an AGW book. Lindzen wrote chapter 2 and Rahmstorf wrote chapter 3 full of critiques to the preceding chapter, without Lindzen ever having been notified. So much for balance and objectivity.

3) If I were Lindzen I would have added a couple of important things (IMHO) to his final reply:

i) There is very little evidence that sulphate aerosols played any big “masking effect” during the instrumental record, as the mid-century cooling was global in extent (actually more pronounced in the SH, according to HadCRU) and nowadays we don’t see the cooling one would expect in China, India or downwind of both.

ii) Rahmstorf’s assertion that the speed of the climate change we are experiencing is unprecented seems rather baseless. One needn’t go to the Younger Dryas or the seemingly abrupt end of the LGM. One can simply take a look at the HadCRU reconstruction of the instrumental record. Both the magnitude and rate of the early 20th century warming are totally comparable to the current one. In fact, as time goes on, it looks increasingly apparent that we are witnessing a global cooling, perhaps not unlike the one that took place around 1945. But that’s another story.

Why was Hansen saying that 2007 was the second warmest year on record and the satellite data said that it was the second coolest in a decade? Or can you jsut wave your hand and say it doesn’t matter? Of course you can. Every thing is so simple if you selectively ignore the facts.

Why was Hansen saying that 2007 was the second warmest year on record and the satellite data said that it was the second coolest in a decade?

January 2007 started out well above average. As the year went on, temperatures dropped considerably until, in January 2008, temperatures went below average.

But if you take the annual average, as Hansen and GISS likes to do, you will end up with an annual average which is above normal and slightly above other years. GISS also then likes to take a five-year running mean (or the past 60 months of temperature) and you can end up with a straight line going up even though the current temperatures are below average.

Of course, when the five year running mean starts to go down, GISS and Hansen will just change how they report to the public recent temperature trends.

Here is Hansen’s monthly numbers from 1998 to Feb 2008 and, of course, this chart gives you a completely different perspective on the second warmest year 2007.

These charts sure look a lot like my stock portfolio today as some big holdings went through support levels set over 2 years ago near the early stages of the recent big bull run up. Please bear with me here, but Hansen’s charts tell me the temperature lows of around 1995 are now being tested. If they go (and they look on the brink), then it appears the next support level is around 1985, after that—well we’ll need a longer chart to figure it out. I’ve never looked at one of these things before. There must be subtleties here I don’t understand because I don’t see how it’s possible to say the trend line hasn’t broken down. Any help?

Why does this paper not get much discussion here?
If the earth has been warming and Anthro CO2 is increasing, the earth is not warming the way the models (which are based on our understanding of greenhouse gases) expect that it should. Our understanding must be way off.
What is ambiguous about that??

I’m a newby here. Will someone please post a link that would allow me to see what the Mann hockey stick looks like after McKitric and McIntyre’s statistical corrections are applied? Actually, a before and after would be better. Thanks.

Robert, there’s an image on Ross McKitrick’s page here:http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
But “what it looks like” shouldn’t be taken to mean “what the climate was actually doing” so much as “what this would have looked like if done correctly” I think. Just a word of caution

80: Robert: M&M didn’t actually “redo” the reconstruction. They pointed out many flaws in the analyses and showed what effect each flaw had on the resulting figure (i.e., they “broke” the hockeystick in many ways). You should probably start by reading McKitrick’s “What is the Hockey Stick Debate All About” — See “favorite posts” in the sidebar. (I trust that Mc will erase this if I’m wrong :))

I am thoroughly convinced that if you don’t spend the time reading both sides of the issue, and engaging with them intellectually, and reading the posts pretty carefully, you will never understand the issue of the Hokey Stick. There is no one paragraph answer, unless you already have the requisite background.

Steve: Eric, please post under one name. No one knows what’s “right” or “wrong”. Do any of them have statistical significance? No. Are any of them robust to slight variations in proxy selection? No. Do Graybill bristlecones and Yamal have a HS shape? Yes. Do Polar Urals and Ababneh? No.

Quantitative conversion between this data and direct temperature changes is a complicated process subject to many systematic uncertainties, however it is estimated that each 1 part per thousand change in δ18O represents roughly a 1.5-2 °C change in tropical sea surface temperatures (Veizer et al. 2000).

To Andrew # 85: Sorry, I meant to put in the National Sea and Ice Data Centre – the NSIDC (rather than NCDC) in my post.

As an example of rewriting the record, here is what the NSIDC did to the historic NH sea ice record last January 2007.

Here is the Before and After animation (and no explanation was given that I am aware of.) While it is clear that the 2007 sea ice minimum was a record low, this data manipulation had a lot to do with how, graphically, it looked like such a reduction.

I’d say it isn’t a valid question Crumb. Why? Phrase it this way: Is any of them right? Becuase, at most one is. Probably (actually definitely, but I’m not that pedant) they are all “wrong”. Do you really think that we have any clue what the temperature of the relative earth was a thousand years ago? Look at the graph again. We haven’t a gosh darn clue.

Incidentally, I love how some people (like you) say you have to dismiss “physics” to doubt the idea that most of recent warming is due to man and we will cuase catastrophic changes in the future. That’s silly. You can calculate the impact of CO2 theoretically, and its smaller than models use, and no big deal. Why? They include feedbacks on the initial changes. How do we know the net feedbacks are positive, indeed strongly positive, so as to triple the warming from CO2 alone? We don’t know. You “think”. There are feedbacks, of course, like the CO2 feedback, but that takes hundreds of years, so it is effectively irrelevent to AGW. And there may be negative feedbacks (recent research supports such feedbacks). At any rate, we don’t have reliable measurements over the whole period of global warming that has occured to know how the aspects natural variability that would be relevent to attribution have behaved. By the way, your “solid” graph includes direct solar forcings, but it does not include possible important indirect effects (I don’t want to get into this and fight with you about what’s been “debunked” but there are highly pluasible mechanisms whereby solar forcing may be underestimated by a factor of 7).

3. CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas; 95% of the contribution is due to Water Vapor.

This zombie argument just won’t die, will it?

Steve: The “just 5%” argument is not one that I’ve ever made nor do I endorse this argument nor do I wish to discuss it here. In my opinion, the only reason why this particular argument continues is the failure of IPCC to provide a step-by-step exposition of how additional CO2 impacts climate. It is not a satisfactory answer to say to every concerned person – go take a course in atmospheric physics. IPCC has had several opportunities to provide a good explanation and put this to bed and has blown every single one of them.

My earlier reference was too cryptic to get a response. Here is the lead-in from the article:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. “Global warming doesn’t mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming.”

Now this is really puzzling. Imagine if we had 3000 we distributed surface stations that came up with the same data set. Of course, as the article notes we may be misreading the signal and the ocean is warming after all. I still think it would be interesting to obtain actual SST data from this source.

Now this is really puzzling. Imagine if we had 3000 we distributed surface stations that came up with the same data set. Of course, as the article notes we may be misreading the signal and the ocean is warming after all. I still think it would be interesting to obtain actual SST data from this source.

Maybe the signal is being “misread,” maybe not. But it seemed to me that the article was doing an awful lot of hedging, almost to the point of saying that there HAD to be some problem with the data. It seems like a lot better way of getting data than buckets and ships’ cooling system inlets!

almost to the point of saying that there HAD to be some problem with the data

I did read that they were having problems with the pressure gauges, which resulted in depth measurement errors, which resulted in temp. reading errors … because the seas are obviously colder at greater depths. I do not know, however, if that particular issue has been resolved. There were also some other depth instruments that were showing a warming trend because they failed to sink as fast as expected.

jae #105:
I had exactly the same reaction. There was an earlier mention of this issue on Real Climate last year. I tracked down what might be the most recent paper and I have a query in to the corresponding author, Dr. Lyman.
He just responded and indicated that another author, Dr. Josh Willis, is about to publish another article and that the data is available at Argo.
This is splendid and all very civilized. Perhaps there is a new openness emerging.

RE#109 – the surface data is still being resolved, as is the proxy data, as are the inconsistent and inaccurate results from GCMs…

If these measurements were providing readings above and beyond what GCMs and greenhouse theory predicted, would there be questions about calibration and resolving differences, or would we just see headlines, “Oceans warming faster than expected and previously thought?”

It certainly is worth noting how much scrutiny was applied to Christy and Spencer’s UAH satellite work compared to the lack of scrutiny applied to, say, MBH98 or the GISS record (until M&M came along), where there were glaring errors. Ditto for the Willis et al work on ocean temps refered to here – which drew an intense amount of scrutiny when it came out and much celebration from the AGW crowd when the results were revised from “cooling” to “not warming” – vs satellite readings of sea level rise that showed a “recent acceleration” over the past buoy measurements.

Eric, actually, the sattelite data still aren’t quite resolved, although for you (who doesn’t care about the science) the descrepancies between RSS, UAH, and the method of Vinnikov and Grody may be trivial. And the data still can’t be made to match what should be happening according to models, especially in the tropics.

The observed absence of heat accumulation (of Joules) in the upper ocean (and in the troposphere) for the last four years means that there has been NO global warming in these climate metrics during this time period. It is unknown whether this is a short term aberration but, regardless, it is clear that the IPCC models have failed to skillfully predict this absence of warming. That should have been the conclusion stated at the end of the NPR story.

The first time this story broke it caused a commotion and a backing off of a strong conclusion of cooling as opposed to no warming. It appears that as the data record has lengthened, the “no warming” finding has become as big a deal as “cooling”.

The data is supposedly available – has anyone here tried to de-cipher and analyze it. Or should we wait for the promised paper from Dr. Willis?

That becomes clear when you consider what’s happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That’s a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

“But in fact there’s a little bit of a mystery. We can’t account for all of the sea level increase we’ve seen over the last three or four years,” he says.

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.

A couple points:
1/2 inch in 4 years is 3mm/year. This is the IPCC/alarmist estimates of sea level rise which means is should be viewed skeptically.

“Estimates of recent rates of global sea level rise (GSLR) vary considerably” noting that many scientists have calculated rates of 1.5 to 2.0 mm per year over the 20th century. They also show that other very credible approaches have led to a 1.1 mm per year result, and they note that “the IPCC [2007] calls for higher rates for the period 1993–2003: 3.1 ± 0.7.” They state that “Debate has centered on the relative contribution of fresh water fluxes, thermal expansion and anomalies in Earth’s rotation.”

“Kolker and Hameed used these relationships to statistically control for variations and trends in atmospheric circulation. They find that the “residual” sea level rise (that not explained by COA variability) in the North Atlantic lies somewhere between 0.49±0.25mm/yr and 0.93±0.39mm/yr depending on the assumptions they employ, which is substantially less than the 1.40 to 2.15 mm per year rise found in the data corrected for the glacial isostatic adjustment”

Sounds like you have alarmists using one set of dubious data which tells them what they want to hear (IPCC sea level rises) to justify making ‘adjustments’ to data that does not tell them what they want to hear when the most obvious conclusion is that the original data set is flawed. This is not science – it is a farce.

n my opinion, the only reason why this particular argument continues is the failure of IPCC to provide a step-by-step exposition of how additional CO2 impacts climate.

I seriously doubt that the IPCC providing a step by step discussion would have stopped this argument. …snip , and it’s not like it comes from a journal article, so it’s certainly not what most skeptics think. But there are a fair number that push this idea.

This historical variation in rate of rise is hard to correlate with global temperature, at least on a year-to-year basis. (It’s also hard to attribute to anything else, which implies that, just maybe, not everything is yet known about the planet’s behavior, including climate).

My understanding is that sea temps. have been increasing pretty steadily (with some other small hiccups) since about the 1950s … and that what the recent data shows is a slight cooling of about .05% … or thereabout. In short, the net result is still substantially warmer seas … with only the smallest showing of recent cooling. Moreover, the inability to account for the overall rise of the seas is troubling. Is the melting even more pronounced than presently perceived? I guess we will find out eventually.

Hi Eric. An issue to think about is: how did people measure the temperature (heat content) of the upper ocean in the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s or recently. I think the answer is that we really didn’t have enough useful data until the last ten or so years and probably can speak only about that recent period.

Re #116-#119. Some scientists who are prominent in the IPCC do attempt short-term predictions. According to a BBC News Online report on 16 Dec. 2003, Prof. Phil Jones told the BBC that ‘Globally, I expect the five years from 2006 to 2010 will be about a tenth of a degree warmer than 2001 to 2005.’ The HadCRU3 series of global surface mean temperature (GSMT) produced by Prof. Jones and his colleagues, which is used by the IPCC, now puts the average GSMT anomaly in the first 26 months of the 2006-2010 quinquennium at .06 C BELOW the monthly average for the 2001-05 quinquennium.

On my arithmetic, it’s now necessary for the average monthly GSMT for Mar. 2008-Dec. 2010 to rise to 0.29 C ABOVE the average for Jan. 2006-Feb. 2008 (or 0.53 C above the average for the recent NH winter/SH summer) if the 2003 prediction is to be realised.

I raised the issue because, apparently, they cannot account for all of the rise. So, I am clearly speculating.

See my comment: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2865#comment-225885
They can’t account for the rise because the the sea level measurements they use are incorrect. Climate science seems to be full of these circles where data that supports the assumption is blindly accepted as correct and data that does not is assumed to be wrong.

Hmm…I just noticed this article by Lindzen in Ecoworld:http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2008/03/12/co2-global-warming/
So, how about an answer, modelers? Why don’t the real data match models? I’m just curious. And no, the data being “wrong” will not be taken as an exceptable answer. I don’t buy that angle.

The demand for snap answers re climate issues is not realistic. If you look at the history of climate science, it is a perpetual process of going back and forth from the observed to the drawing board. In fact, the idea of feedbacks partially emerged from the wacky responses of early GCMs. So, conundrums raise issues … that generate hypotheses … that eventually turn into robust theories … warts and all. That’s just how it is.

Eric, Eric, Eric…I dont want “snap answers”, this issue has been festering for a while. Its a serious model flaw. So, given this fact, should we believe the models or not? (Hint: the rational answer is ~not~). You previously insisted that all the evidence points to CO2. Well, this doesn’t. By the way, what you’ve described goes along with the history of science, but not climate science. The history of climate science, in brief, consists of one side arguing from observations that models are wrong, and another say the observations must be wrong becuase the great edifice of Global Warming says so, so the models are fine. Surprisingly, although it is rare that this happens in normal science, the latter have ocassionally been right about observations being wrong. But even then, the corrections aren’t usually sufficient to line up with reality.

Re #127 to #129: I posted the following in Unthreaded #31: Hidden away on page 25 of the March 5, 2008 Winnipeg Sun is a headline entitled GREENLAND MELT. The title is deceiving as well as what the short article does not say. At first glance it suggests that the the Greenland ice sheet is getting warmer and could add seven metres to the sea level. This feeds right in to those who are proclaiming that we are doomed. However, if one is really interested, and does not accept all they hear, then you search for the complete NASA study (published in Journal of Glaciology) and read it. Now we find that the total mass of ice in Greenland has actually /*increased*/ in the last decade, while the mass in Antarctica has decreased giving a net world loss. And the scientists have also found that the contribution of melting ice to sea level rise is much less than expected – only /*two percent*/ of the three millimetres a year!

If I remember rightly, and I did comment on it here at the time of the annoucement, Dr Jones said that the temperatures would stabilize just to 2009 when the global super heating would resume. My comment at the time was that the date coincided with the expected sunspot peaks.

This was all predicted by their new super duper high resolution 10 year climate prediction model, the results of which were available to any company willing to pay for the service.

That’s right, it’s more like about 80%, not 95% All estimates, but hey.

RC post #142 says “Making some allowance (+/-5%) for the crudeness of my calculation, the maximum supportable number for the importance of water vapour alone is about 60-70% and for water plus clouds 80-90% of the present day greenhouse effect.”

They also have output from Model E there that shows “Removed Absorbers ‘All except H2O+Clouds’ LW absorbed is 85%”

Wikipedia uses the above post quite a few times, including as a ref for this “On Earth, the major greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36–70% of the greenhouse effect (not including clouds); ” but also uses a ref to Kiehl and Trenberth: Kiehl, J. T.; Kevin E. Trenberth (February 1997). “Earth’s Annual Global Mean Energy Budget” (PDF). Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 78 (2): 197-208. which confirms.

So you are correct, it’s more like 80%. But there’s no point in discussing it here. Perhaps you should email the people at middlebury.net and alert them of your discovery.

Spain is turning hi-tech to solve its water woes. As crops wither and reservoirs evaporate in its worst drought for 60 years, an international team of scientists is designing a system to increase rainfall on the country’s parched Mediterranean coast.

Using the world’s first space-based rain radar aboard NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite, Shepherd and colleagues found that mean monthly rainfall rates within 30-60 kilometers (18 to 36 miles) downwind of the cities were, on average, about 28 percent greater than the upwind region. In some cities, the downwind area exhibited increases as high as 51 percent.

It was also found that, on average, maximum rainfall rates in downwind regions often exceeded the maximum values in upwind regions by 48 percent – 116 percent. These results are very consistent with earlier related experiments in St. Louis, Missouri and near Atlanta

I attempted to locate the source of the differences that I noted in an earlier post when comparing the surface record of the GISS temperature data set to that of the satellite data set issued by UAH. The results of a zonal analysis are complied in the table below and are for the period 1979-2007. The trends are given in degrees C per decade. I would like to pursue differences between data sets and determine why they are different.

Although for my first pass I could not find exact zonal regions in all cases to make an exact comparison, I think the zones are sufficiently close to say that the zonal differences with the largest discrepancies occur overall in the NH and more specifically in polar region of the NH. To a lesser extent there are differences in the equatorial region. The US temperatures are nearly the same from both of these temperature measuring sources as noted previously.

Also worth noting again, I think, is that my analysis of the Watts USHCN station ratings indicated that the period of large differences between temperature trends for the CRN45 and CRN123 stations occurred before the 1979-2007 comparison here between GISS and UAH.

Well Lief, it wasn’t me who said that, but would that it were so. It does not appear to be. It appears to be more a case of increasing rationalization. FOr instance in the article about “slight ocean cooling”, or as they put it “Less rapid warming”, there is the inexplicable hypthosis that somehow the warming skipped the near surface and is hidden in the “deep ocean.” That is not science, it is futile spin. Obviously there is something going on that the models don’t pick up. It is extremely inconvienient for the modelers now that it is rather difficult to invent some aerosols for this period, now that we have the instruments to show that they are not there.

Would have been nice to have such instruments during the LIA and Maunder Minimum. Each time the observations get better, the modelers lose a knob they can turn to fine tune their results to observation.

Here’s a semi-random extract from a UN Planning Seminar on the Oceans in 2004:

Free Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) experiments. Both SOLAS and the IMBER project have proposed FACE-like experiments for the ocean. The benefit of such experiments is that they are more likely to show the actual long-term effects that will occur in the future. The major anticipated drawback is that it might be impossible to use for pelagic communities without enclosing them in some way or somehow using a Lagrangian approach. There is a need to start with a feasibility study because the amount of CO2 or acid required for a full-scale pelagic FACE experiment may be very high. The other drawback is the public perception problem. This drawback might be approached by pointing out that the effects of elevated CO2 under “business as usual” scenarios may be so severe that understanding them might cause policymakers to think more carefully about emission controls or other mitigation methods.

I emailed one of the of the cited authors, Richard Feely, (in summary) “What change in atmospheric C02 is needed to cause a given oceanic pH change to a specified depth & temperature?” There was no direct answer in his reply paper, but it had some interesting comments, like:

It is now well established that the pH of our ocean surface waters has already fallen by about 0.1 units from an average of about 8.21 to 8.10 since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Estimates of future atmospheric and oceanic carbon dioxide concentrations, based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) CO2 emission scenarios and general circulation models, indicate that by the middle of this century atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could reach more than 500 ppmv, and near the end of the century they could be over 800 ppmv. This would result in a further surface water pH decrease of 0.2–0.3 pH, and the carbonate ion concentration would decrease almost 50 percent by the end of the century (Orr et al., 2005). To put this in historical perspective, this surface ocean pH decrease would result in a pH that is lower than it has been for more than 20 million years (Feely et al., 2004).

and

Over the next century, if CO2 emissions are allowed to increase as predicted by the IPCC CO2 emissions scenarios, humans may be responsible for increasing oceanic CO2 to levels that are more corrosive to calcifying organisms than anytime since the last major extinction, over 65 million years ago. Thus, the decisions we make about our use of fossil-fuels for energy over the next several decades will have a profound influence on the future composition of marine ecosystems for centuries to millennia.

and there’s more

Upon death, the carbonate shells fall through the water column and are either dissolved or deposited in shallow or deep-sea sediments.

(Dogmatic. No alternative mechanisms suggested.)

Reference not given, but cited as “Ocean Acidification of the North Pacific Ocean” by Richard A. Feely, Victoria J. Fabry and John M. Guinotte.

Dr. Richard A. Feely’s (Richard.A.Feely@noaa.gov) major research areas are carbon cycling in the oceans and ocean acidification processes. He received a B.A. in Chemistry from the University of St. Thomas, in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1969. He then went onto Texas A&M University, where he received an M.S degree in 1971 and a Ph. D. degree in 1974. Both of his post-graduate degrees were in Chemical Oceanography. He is a member of the Science Steering Committees for the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program, the U.S. Ocean Carbon and Climate Change Program, and the U.S. Ocean Carbon and Biochemistry Program. Dr. Feely has authored more than 160 refereed research publications. In PICES, he co-chaired WG 13 on CO2 in the North Pacific, was a member of WG 17 on Biogeochemical data integration and synthesis, and now serves a member of the Section on Carbon and climate.

Maybe it is time to reopen the subject of CO2 and oceans as a CA thread. Some of these assertions simply cannot be justified. They come from a senior person. As Steve has found, audit of such positions can be edifying.

It would have been easier on Dr Feely to answer the simple question than to preach dogma.

Sam:
You mean like those damn Hudson Bay polar bears who migrated from the southern part to where food was more plentiful and screwed up the polar bear census! At the same time, the local Inuit are arguing to increase the annual kill quota to keep the polar bear numbers m in check and to pay the bills.

There was a comment on a thread somewhere about a month or two ago on where Al Gore got the story and picture of the “stranded” polar bears. Can anyone find that reference? I tried searching and could not get it. Thanks.

If these proxies are “statistically meaningless” … how do we explain the fact that they roughly reflect the MWP and the LIA, as well as the recent rise in temps., as corroborated by both surface temp. stations and satellite temp. recordings?

Pure coincidence … or is something else going on … such as the evidence is telling us something about historical temp. trends?

If these proxies are “statistically meaningless” … how do we explain the fact that they roughly reflect the MWP and the LIA

Funny, I thought the AGW crowd claimed any warming during the supposed MWP was “regional” and occurred at different times across the globe? I don’t see picking a few peaks on various spaghetti graphs as necessarily reflecting the MWP. If the MWP peaks were 3 times as high and the LIA dips 3 times as low as they are on that chart (with 20th century temps kept as shown), wouldn’t you be able to make the same argument that this revised reflects the MWP, LIA, and “recent rise in temps?”

In any case, it should be obvious that just because a proxy visually “reflects” something you believe to be true doesn’t mean the relationship is a “statistically meaningful” one.

Note also that the IPCC in 2001 said that most proxy reconstructions, including MBH, did not “reflect” the end of the LIA at the time dictated by glacier melt data from the 19th century. So there is physical evidence which disputes the “reflections” of these proxies.

as well as the recent rise in temps., as corroborated by both surface temp. stations and satellite temp. recordings?

You need to read up on the divergence problem if you really think this is the case. Your spaghetti chart conveniently hides problems in the 20th century (and in the case of “satellite temp. recordings,” since 1979).

Bernie: Overpopulated deer get hit by cars a lot, but then again, so do people. But of course, shooting deer and feeding your family is wrong. Must be global warming.

Michael: UHI is local, it doesn’t cause rain 20 miles away. It can’t get into the wind currents. It doesn’t cover thousands of square miles. But a tree in Denver can tell me the temperatures in Phoenicia.

Duffy: “Can you tell us about NASA’s Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we’re now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?”

Marohasy: “That’s right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you’re going to get a positive feedback. That’s what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.”

Duffy: “The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?”

169:
I’d like to know where Marohasy (an Australian biologist, I believe, who works for a free market think tank) gets her “data”, because NASA has made no announcements on the “data” that she is peddling. Besides, it’s not the aqua satellite, per se, but the CERES instruments which have been in use since about 1997. Any independent sources on the “data” would be welcome.

Aqua carries six state-of-the-art instruments in a near-polar low-Earth orbit. The six instruments are the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A), the Humidity Sounder for Brazil (HSB), the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E), the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES). Each has unique characteristics and capabilities, and all six serve together to form a powerful package for Earth observations.

It’s been a month or so since I saw it but I think he mentions that Spencer is about the publish a larger work on the data in question. Note that the attacks to a one lack substance and do not talk about the data or the science…per usual.

Abstract
We explore the daily evolution of tropical intraseasonal oscillations in satellite-observed tropospheric temperature, precipitation, radiative fluxes, and cloud properties. The warm/rainy phase of a composited average of fifteen oscillations is accompanied by a net reduction in radiative input into the ocean-atmosphere system, with longwave heating anomalies transitioning to longwave cooling during the rainy phase. The increase in longwave cooling is traced to decreasing coverage by ice clouds, potentially supporting Lindzen’s “infrared iris” hypothesis of climate stabilization. These observations should be considered in the testing of cloud parameterizations in climate models, which remain sources of substantial uncertainty in global warming prediction.

When somebody makes the trenchant scientific case that so-and-so is a member of a “free market think tank”, I am just awestruck by their scientific acumen. Seriously. When I get over the shock and awe of such a display of scientific eriudition, I just then accept everything else the poster says as gospel. Really Eric, that is groupthink stuff. I know you can’t hear it when I say it, but it is. You got that from some mindguard like Gavin, and came and repeated it here, relieved to have some reply.

But the extreme reluctance for most scientists to even entertain the possibility that some of it might be natural suggests to me that climate research has become corrupted.

The extreme reluctance of climate skeptics to acknowledge the vast and varied evidence for a dominant anthropogenic component to the recent warming leads me to believe that climate skepticism has become corrupted.

Boris,
I think the position of most skeptics here is that the AGW science is appaulingly poorly peer reviewed due to extremely agressive group think within the community. The “vast and varied evidence for a dominant anthropogenic component” simply does not exist though.

What is happening is that every critic of the IPCC critic is labeled as “denier”.
The sceptics are as diverse as the alarmists. Personally I spent more time discussing with those who reject manmade CO2 rise than with IPCC followers. I also have personal experience where a technical paper criticising warming in Europe was prima facie rejected. My only way out to publsh was in Energy and Environment.
ref:
Hans Erren, 2007, Comment on the climate station of the University of Hohenheim: Analysis of air temperature and precipitation time series since 1878, Energy and Environment 2007, volume 18, number 6, p797-800.http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mscp/ene/2007/00000018/00000006/art00007

“A recent United Nations study estimates that 80 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2025, so a better understanding of the impact of urban land use change on Earth’s water cycle system is vital,” Shepherd said.

But the extreme reluctance for most scientists to even entertain the possibility that some of it might be natural suggests to me that climate research has become corrupted.

The extreme reluctance of climate skeptics to acknowledge the vast and varied evidence for a dominant anthropogenic component to the recent warming leads me to believe that climate skepticism has become corrupted.

Those two statements are not equivalent in the way you wish them to be. An “extreme reluctance to acknowledge” the claim that there is “vast and varied evidence” supporting a theory is certainly not the equivalent of an “extreme reluctance to even entertain a possibility”.

Or, to put it another way: Very few skeptics vehemently dismiss even the possibility of a dominant anthropogenic component to warming — certainly not with the angry, lock-step uniformity of denial that one generally hears from the AGW proponents when someone suggests that the warming might be natural.

So you cannot dismiss Spencer’s point on the grounds that it applies equally to the skeptical side — it simply doesn’t.

Hans Erren says: ” also have personal experience where a technical paper criticising warming in Europe was prima facie rejected. My only way out to publsh was in Energy and Environment.”
Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one.

Saw an interesting quote talking about medical science but would seem to pertain to climate science as well.

Marcia Angell, former editor of the NEJM, has observed that the “significant results” reported in published studies can be properly interpreted only by knowing how many studies reporting opposite results were rejected by the editors.

What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.”

vs.

The increase in longwave cooling is traced to decreasing coverage by ice clouds, potentially supporting Lindzen’s “infrared iris” hypothesis of climate stabilization. These observations should be considered in the testing of cloud parameterizations in climate models, which remain sources of substantial uncertainty in global warming prediction.

Perhaps Marohasy is far more of a free market pamphleteer than she is a scientist? It seems to me that her press statement is far stronger than what the science is saying … at a minimum? Is it a problem if I point that out?

Eric, Hows about you diagram the exact way in which the second quote directly contradicts the first? Or in which the items in the second quote are not “potentially” supported by the first. Here is your big chance. Don’t blow it. Take your comments up to that next level, the one where a post contains actual content generated by your own mind.

By analyzing six years of data from a variety of satellites and satellite sensors, we found that when the tropical atmosphere heats up due to enhanced rainfall activity, the rain systems there produce less cirrus cloudiness, allowing more infrared energy to escape to space. The combination of enhanced solar reflection and infrared cooling by the rain systems was so strong that, if such a mechanism is acting upon the warming tendency from increasing carbon dioxide, it will reduce manmade global warming by the end of this century to a small fraction of a degree. Our results suggest a “low sensitivity” for the climate system.

The decrease in ice cloud coverage is conceptually consistent with the “infrared iris” hypothesized by Lindzen et al. [2001], who proposed that tropical cirroform [ice] cloud coverage might open and close, like the iris of an eye, in response to anomalously warm or cool conditions, providing a negative radiative feedback on temperature change. We caution, though, that the ice cloud reduction with tropospheric warming reported here is on a time scale of weeks; it is not obvious whether similar behavior would occur on the longer time scales associated with global warming.

In the press release accompanying the publication of their work, Spencer describes the potential implications as follows:

“To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent,” Spencer said. “The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming.”

The only way to see how these new findings impact global warming forecasts is to include them in computerized climate models.

I would suggest that everybody here send Spencer an email and see why he thinks that GCMs are valuable tools for studying climate.

The behavior we observed in the real climate system is exactly opposite to how computerized climate models that predict substantial global warming have been programmed to behave. We are still waiting to see if any of those models are adjusted to behave like the real climate system in this regard.

“Arguing about whether we can or cannot already see the effects,” he said, “is like sitting in a house soaked in gasoline, having just dropped a lit match, and arguing about whether we can actually see the flames yet, while waiting to see if maybe it might go out on its own.”

“The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming.”

So, we are left with this statement which, apparently, is neither subject to proof of disproof. That takes us a long way from the statements made by Marohasy, who seemed to imply that a testable hypothesis was afoot.

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant.”

Duffy: “It’s not only that it’s not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there’s any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it’s put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary.”

V. Ramanathan and University of Iowa chemical engineer Greg Carmichael, said that soot and other forms of black carbon could have as much as 60 percent of the current global warming effect of carbon dioxide, more than that of any greenhouse gas besides CO2.

Ramanathan and Carmichael integrated observed data from satellites, aircraft and surface instruments about the warming effect of black carbon and found that its forcing, or warming effect in the atmosphere, is about 0.9 watts per meter squared. That compares to estimates of between 0.2 watts per meter squared and 0.4 watts per meter squared that were agreed upon as a consensus estimate in a report released last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Between 25 and 35 percent of black carbon in the global atmosphere comes from China and India, emitted from the burning of wood and cow dung in household cooking and through the use of coal to heat homes. Countries in Europe and elsewhere that rely heavily on diesel fuel for transportation also contribute large amounts.

I would suggest that everybody here send Spencer an email and see why he thinks that GCMs are valuable tools for studying climate.

GCMs must be an invaluable tool for investigating how climate mechanisms might work; however they seem to possess little skill in predicting future climate. It is the second point that I imagine most skeptics have issues with.

The extreme reluctance of climate skeptics to acknowledge the vast and varied evidence for a dominant anthropogenic component to the recent warming leads me to believe that climate skepticism has become corrupted.

Uh, Pat Michaels anyone? No one (well, perhaps a few people) claim that there is no anthropogenic component. That it has “dominated” recent warming…well, how recent? At any rate, many skeptics believe in a strong anthropogenic component of recent warming-land use.

Eric, you are being an annoying nit-picker. Are you actually trying to hold us accountable for what other people say?

This all fits with my contention that the bulk of any warming there is (arguendo the anomaly represents the temperature and the temperature is an effect with a cause) is caused by pollution and cities, roads, farms, etc.

You can’t have 7 billion humans and their cows and land and roads and farms and energy being used and pollution created without modifying the environment. But of course, what is Earth here for? To sit pristine and unspoiled by animals and plants alone, it would like that better? To spin through the heavens with nothing but plants and non-human animals, more free and happy without any dispoilation from messy fuel burning road building humans? No. It’s an inanimate object, here for us to craft to ourselves, which supports us and keeps us alive. So we have to be smart about it, but there’s nothing wrong with scraping out some black rock and burning it.

It’s like worrying about your house and thinking it cries when you have to paint it or you convert the garage to a room or light a fire in the fireplace or a window gets broken or replaced.

Eric, you are being an annoying nit-picker. Are you actually trying to hold us accountable for what other people say?

No. However, I thought Marohasy went a bit over the line with her comments on the “data” … as if some sweeping new find were going to wash away the AGW theory in one fell swoosh — or two. That was clearly the impression that she sought to convey … yet, Spencer was much more limited in his comments re the data. That’s all. In any case, this site is devoted to nit picking … no? So, what’s the problem?

Steve: No one here can object to close examination of details. I don’t support every comment made at other sites and am not accountable for such comments if that’s implied (which I don’t believe was the intent.) I don’t support all the comments made here for that matter.

Or, maybe that was clearly the fabrication you were trying to infer?
In the future, it’s usually easier to understand what someone is trying to say by looking at what they actually said. Not what you think they said.

Kind of amusing that somebody who has clearly demonstrated for all to see that he does not read the links to the end before taking them out of context is also the expert on what people are “trying to say.” In the words of Bart Simpson, “The ironing is delicious.”

Reference, SciAm has gone off the deep end. The literally hade an article titled something like “Are all corporations necessarily evil?” last month. I’m not sure who they think they are catering to but it ain’t me anymore. “Even skeptics admit Global Warming is real”. Wow, amazing how they structure their arguments, isn’t it? Almost like all the people who try to say we should all believe AGW becuase Bush was going along with it. The truth is that for skeptics, its about the science. After all, shouldn’t we have given up when all the US Presidential candidates ended up being AGW believers if it was about the politics/policy? SciAm is trying to say “Do something, becuase even the big oil paid satan climate skeptics admit there is a positive trend!” What does SciAm have to gain from all this? Why would they do this? Is it all Hansen (he’s written articles for them) or what? This is getting pathetic.

244:
I thought Spencer sounded very, well, sound. I am frankly glad that there are people like Spencer holding the line. Ironically (with Spencer in mind) it’s sort of like evolution … only the fittest theories should prevail … and you need good scientists on the other side to take down the weak ones. Steve gets credit for that as well.

Don’t get me wrong … I’ll dance in the streets if AGW gets dashed on the rocks by a good theory of climate stability, etc. I like ample heat, electricity, and surplus crops. However, I have yet to see a good theory … and am left mostly persuaded by AGW … and tend to err on the side of climate being sensitive out of caution … that is, until it is shown, safely, that climate is not as sensitive as the consensus projects.

Well far be it from me to argue with that logic. Just don’t expect me to suddenly agree that the evidence tends to favor (classic) AGW. I remain unconvinced. Which is not to say I don’t think there is a human impact, but I think the emphasis on CO2, and the models, well, they are wrong. Their results are still possible (it is of course impossible to disprove the mere possibility of catastophic warming). Use precuationary reasoning if you want, but it will come to bite back at you.

Also, I’m going to contribute a somewhat depressing bit for everyone to chew on-That, in my view, if the model results are (against the odds) correct, its too late to do anything about it.

Don’t get me wrong … I’ll dance in the streets if AGW gets dashed on the rocks by a good theory of climate stability, etc. I like ample heat, electricity, and surplus crops. However, I have yet to see a good theory … and am left mostly persuaded by AGW … and tend to err on the side of climate being sensitive out of caution … that is, until it is shown, safely, that climate is not as sensitive as the consensus projects.

You have to remember that most magazines about science or technology are written by reporters who also have some experience in the specialty of the magazine. First and foremost, their thought process is reporter, not scientist.

LOL. If it’s too late, then it’s too late, so let’s all dance in the streets now, while we still have the chance (Zorba said that). Get a grip; this is an extremely resilient planet. I’ve been through so many of these faux crises that all I can do is laugh.

If climate shifted in the past due to natural forcing … why not in the present or near future due to human forcing? “Resilience” has not prevented climate from shifting radically before. What’s different now? Is “resilience” as you postulate it here a testable hypothesis? What mechanism do you propose?

Oh, and then you’ll be able to see what happens in the next solar cycle, over the next few hundred years what happens, the next glacial whenever it hits, the point where humanity dies off from some event (nuclear war, pandemic, sun going supernova, sea level rise over time if it happens, whatever). Or perhaps you’ll see space travel before the sun goes supernova and none of those other things will happen and there’ll still be people. But this planet is going away sooner or later, we know that.

Besides, it confuses sudden shifts in major systems changing things drastically and radically with other slower less destructive changes, or changes to various parts of major systems that other parts adjust for.

The first is cataclysmic and the second is the resiliant. Don’t try to talk about them as if they’re the same thing.

You’re saying something equivalent to treating acid rain or ozone depletion or polution in the same way as a meteor knocking off a chunk of Earth the size of the moon.

The LIA was fairly sudden … and likely horrific for those affected — e.g., extreme weather variation and famine in Europe and the Americas. The point is … climate changes … and quickly … history shows that to be so. If so, why can’t human forcing be a cause for sudden and dramatic climate change too… a change that could rock civilization as we know it? Some say “resilience” … and my question is … what is it that makes the planet resilient … by what mechanism?

That is a concern of mine too … particularly if we lose too much more of the Amazon … which could well dash the earth’s ability to cope with increased forcing … from all sources.

The Amazon is a bit more complicated than that. Yes, burning of forests releases GHGs. Maybe I need to read up on more current literature, but I seem to recall a number of studies (such as the following one) found the Amazon rain forests to be net CO2 sources or CO2 neutral, not sinks. There have been plenty of other studies suggesting open grasslands in some areas are preferable to forests when it comes to CO2 http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/climate/2002-04-10-amazon-co2.htm

The LIA was fairly sudden … and likely horrific for those affected — e.g., extreme weather variation and famine in Europe and the Americas. The point is … climate changes … and quickly … history shows that to be so. If so, why can’t human forcing be a cause for sudden and dramatic climate change too… a change that could rock civilization as we know it?

So you admit the LIA was “fairly sudden…and likely horrific.” Surely you agree there is no explanation for the LIA that has anything to do with man-made GHG emissions. So why can’t you wonder if much or nearly all of the warming since then be natural, too?

I thought Spencer sounded very, well, sound. I am frankly glad that there are people like Spencer holding the line. Ironically (with Spencer in mind) it’s sort of like evolution … only the fittest theories should prevail … and you need good scientists on the other side to take down the weak ones. Steve gets credit for that as well.

Don’t get me wrong … I’ll dance in the streets if AGW gets dashed on the rocks by a good theory of climate stability, etc. I like ample heat, electricity, and surplus crops. However, I have yet to see a good theory … and am left mostly persuaded by AGW … and tend to err on the side of climate being sensitive out of caution … that is, until it is shown, safely, that climate is not as sensitive as the consensus projects.

The difference between the majority of skeptics and alarmists is paper thin as far as the science is concerned – it’s far more about interpretation.

March 25th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
The LIA was fairly sudden … and likely horrific for those affected — e.g., extreme weather variation and famine in Europe and the Americas. The point is … climate changes … and quickly … history shows that to be so. If so, why can’t human forcing be a cause for sudden and dramatic climate change too… a change that could rock civilization as we know it? Some say “resilience” … and my question is … what is it that makes the planet resilient … by what mechanism?

The LIA is not to be compared to AGW “projections”. The LIA was slow and mild downward change compared to the stuff we are supposed to face in the future.

Okay, here’s my depressing rationale for “It’s too late”. Put aside for the moment any doubts you have about the models. Assume they are correct. Well, what do they say? According to the models, there is warming “in the pipe” that will occur even if we hold the concentration of gases constant, along with everything else. We actually know what would hypothetically happen, according to the models, if we held GHG cocentrations at 2000 levels (and we are already past that). That’s not emmissions, but mixing ratios. In order to achieve that, we’d need to achieve emmissions=0 now and even remove CO2 from the atmosphere. That’s not happening. So, we are locked in for a bare minimum of .5 C:

Well, that’s essentially politically and perhaps even physically impossible. But maybe we could cut emmissions some, right? Then we’d make a difference, right? No dice. As long as emmissions remain positive, they add to the atmosphere (I don’t know of a level at which they wouldn’t). And as long as CO2 goes up, Temperature should go up, according to the models. Based on world population trends, I would expect a 50% growth in emmissions by 2100. Do the math yourself:

Eric; You’re trying to compare a period somewhere between 1250-1850 or 1650-1850 to right now? Anyway, non sequiter; we’re talking about the planet, not its non-industrialized inhabitants of ~800 million.

Andrew; More IR absorbing gases absorb more IR. Doesn’t mean that equals a net increase in the Earth’s energy budget. Or whatever you want to call it. :)

MarkW says:
March 26th, 2008 at 5:11 am
sun going supernova
I doubt the planet is that resilient.

Sam, if you read carefully, my discussion presumes that the models are right, and the models say that it does lead to a net increase, so that was a starting assumption. A bad one? Maybe, but that’s the platform for discussion I’m working from.

If the models are correct, then it gets warmer. So what. “Warmer” has been turned into a boogeyman in spite of the fact that we know the net benefits will outweigh the net costs. Every alarmist on the planet has egotistically assumed that “now” or perhaps “in the recent past” was some optimal climate in spite of the mountains of evidence that supports the opposite claim, i.e. the known warm periods in the past (way back) were much more prosperous for life in general.

No need to be depressed other than because such alarmism will continue unabated if it does continue to warm and the policy decisions that result will ultimately be a net loss (staggering, IMO). If it doesn’t, they’ll find a new hobby-horse.

Actually the Sun is a main Sequence star and does not have enough mass to go Supernova. It will enter a Red Giant phase in about 5 billion years. However according to Wikipedia

… even during its life in the main sequence the Sun is gradually becoming more luminous, its surface temperature slowly rising. The increase in solar temperatures is such that in about 900 million years, the surface of the Earth will become too hot for the survival of life as we know it. After another billion years the surface water will have completely disappeared.

It’s not me who’s going to be depressed by my statement. It’s others, who believe the models are right. Im being generous and allowing for that possibility, and then droping the bombshell on them. Hmm….Maybe I should write an editorial on the subject. Perhaps it will make the evening news!

News Flash! Denialist says you can’t do anything about AGW! We investigate his Exxon funding at eleven!

Andrew: I assume the models may be correct, but doubt the anomaly reflects anything physical. Certainly I’m not going to put my trust in any of it. Too uncertain. But right, for the sake of argument and all.

Mark: Ask 100 people what the perfect temperature is, and what’s too warm or too cold.

Mark: Ask 100 people what the perfect temperature is, and what’s too warm or too cold.

Yup. Interestingly, I was standing outside this morning in a tee-shirt having a quick smoke… the temperature: under 40. The sun is out, however, and there isn’t much wind, and this is, of course, Colorado. At 7000 feet, 40 in the sun with no wind is quite comfortable. Sit in the ocean when the temp is a whopping 70, however, and you’ll be shivering in under an hour if you aren’t surfing (70 and below is when the shorty suits go on in Florida, can’t imagine those poor saps in sub-50 water in California). :)

Sorry about the late advisory on the Spencer interview, but it’s available on line. Go to “am770CHQR.com”. Click on “hosts and shows” from a menue line near the top, then down the left side to “audio vault”. The program aired at 11am MST. It loads fairly quickly, but you’ll probably have to listen to about five minutes of local Calgary news before the interview begins. Enjoy.

RC’s purpose is not served by having fresh content. The debate is over. So when its cold here on earth, they need to talk about venus or the milky way. When the summer comes you see stories about
heatwaves, and then in hurrican season, you seel stories on that and then a Sea ice minimum story.

Occassionaly they will pull a skeptic to the public square and beat him for the amusement
of ray ladbury and others.

re 278.. The march 18 press conference about old ice being gone was a Prophalytic PR measure.

March is the artic max, the 2008 Max was higher than the past few years ( big deal, sheesh) They thought sceptics might make a big deal out of this so they hold a Press conference to announce that
Yes the Ice came back, but the Grandma Ice died.

Scientists are citing “rapid climate change in a fast-warming region of Antarctica” as the cause of an initial collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf. The damage got started at the end of February when an iceberg dropped off and triggered the “runaway disintegration” of a 160-square-mile portion of the 5,282-square-mile shelf.

The ice shelf, which scientists speculate has floated in the Antarctic region for hundreds of years, is succumbing to recent rises in temperature in the area–an average of 0.9 degree Fahrenheit every 10 years for the last 50 years.

Has there really been a 4.5F temp rise in that area over the last 50 years, and from what to what?

Even if Antarctica was all ice shelf (which it isn’t), if a 160 sq mile section “collapsed” every year it would take 33,750 years for it to go away. A section this large would need to vanish every day for it to vanish in 92 years. Of course, 99% of it is on land, not over water, and can’t “collapse”.

Word on the street has it that in the 70ties an ice shelf broke off that was so large that it ran ashore in south africa. It was all over the news,but not linked to global warming of course. Can anyone verify this??

Darn I missed it! On the CNN World News Europe 21.00 edition, around 21.25 GMT, there was an item about the chunk of the Antartica Wilkins ice shelf that broke off, I was listening to a new CD and the sound of the TV was off. Two scientific friends of Gore gave a comment (Lonnie Thomson and James Hansen). I waited for the next edition to hear it but the item did not turn up and a web search on CNN was not fruitful.
A comment on the CNN website by David Vaughn:”I didn’t expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread — we’ll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be.” was quoted in the Story Highlights as: “I didn’t expect to see things happen this quickly,” scientist says (imo this is a tainted quote)http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/03/25/antarctic.ice/index.html

The maybe “collapsing ice shelf” is a minuscule structure, in a semi arctic area of the Palmer / Antarctic Peninsula, closer to Tierra Del Fuego than it is to the South Pole. It is on the Pacific side, adjacent to an oceanic subduction zone, and there is certainly tectonic activity in the area, expressed as both seismic activity and geothermal activity. Of course the MSM (including National Geographic) fail to give this context.

This Antarctic ice shelf collapse area is so small, the exact location cannot even be pinned down using the MODIS real-time satellite images which have a resolution down to 250M. (I have never had this difficulty before.) It must just be a very small bay which calves off icebergs on a regular basis (where do they think icebergs come from anyway?).

Have you noticed the video and the satellite images provided by the alarmers do not give you any kind of perspective of how big the area is. That is done on purpose of course.

On the other side of the Pennisula just 100 miles away, is the Larsen ice shelf (made famous by Hansen and Gore in his propagamentary) where the sea ice did not melt at all this year.

This bay was the usual entry into the continent by polar explorers since the ice melted all the way back to coast in Antarctica’s summer melt season. Not this year. They would not have gotten within 300 miles of the coast this year which I presume is some kind of record.

So, the area itself, was not subject to any kind of above-normal melting this past year.

Here are two links to satellite pictures of the area from a few days ago. The first link is to provide a little perspective where the ice shelf collapse area is. It is really too small to see at this resolution.

The area can be nailed down with the second link at the higher resolution but a person needs to have the perspective of the first link to be able to find it in the second. The higher resolution also shows there are lots of ice bergs of similar size which have broken off in the surrounding area which I presume is not unusual.

consider that since the last ice age, the west Antarctic ice sheet has lost nearly two thirds of its mass

NASA – 2001

But it should stop now because we sincerely wish it would and we promise to sin no more. Either it gets smaller or it gets bigger. Perfect balance is a fnatasy of the Erics of the world. If forced to choose, I would choose a shrinking ice sheet over a growing one any day.

Re#297, that article supports the idea that adaptation should be our focus. People who ascribe to that belief often get cast into the “skeptic,” “denialist,” or “agnostic” categories.

Well, I yam what I yam.

On the Antartic ice break up…When the Arctic ice rebounded, they said it was due to the extreme low leaving plenty of room for rexpansion. So, maybe this breakup is becuase there had recently been more ice than ever?

On the Antartic ice break up…When the Arctic ice rebounded, they said it was due to the extreme low leaving plenty of room for rexpansion. So, maybe this breakup is becuase there had recently been more ice than ever?

Not where this ice sheet is! As I understand it the absence of sea ice leaves it exposed to wind and waves, hence the break-up.

The links — the first one worked for me; the second one, the image itself is broken.

This is what gets me about the Ramanathan & Charmichael paper’s abstract:

emissions of black carbon are the second strongest contribution to current global warming, after carbon dioxide emissions.

That ascertation is unfounded. And probably wrong; the first biggest addition to any warming would not be any single GHG and probably not all of them together; it would be population, waste energy, industrialization, urbanization, farming and transportation as a group.

Then comes black carbon. Which comes from the same thing anyway.

Besides the paragraph hinging on the assumption it actually is warming.

GHG are just a mechanism to absorb and hold energy. Do you blame water boiling on natural gas? The stove? The pan? No, you point to the people that filled the thing, put it on the stove, and lit the burner.

See the mindset? And Mashey is complaining about PR tactics. Even scientists that are smart enough to figure out that much of whatever is going on is due to particulates (I like calling it the generic “pollution” because the stuff in the air is part of it all also) have been brainwashed. Everyone’s bought into the lingo…

Phil, It took me a while to “get” your “drift”. So, I think you mean that the ice that just broke off came from somewhere where the ice has been trending down? That is, after all, happen in some parts of Antarctica.

Sam, I would agree with the complaint you have, but obviously reviewers don’t give a damn anymore. They also fail to acknowledge (or maybe they don’t realize?) that any additional source of warming necessarily lowers the CS and thus reduces the catastrophe!

You are probably linking to specially generated temporary files, which are cleared periodically on the website. You may still be able to see them because they are in your temporary cache. Every one else just gets a broken link. I had a similar problem recently with NASA_GISS temp files. I thought the “temp” stood for temperature!

#314: actually, mean extension of Antarctica sea ice is increasing, with a sudden big increase in the last 2 years (contrary to the sudden big decrease of Arctic sea ice in the same time), but of course it could be not everywhere, with different regions where local value goes from “increasing” to “stable” to “decreasing” (in the same Arctic, the region of Greenland and Svalbard is not seeing any real decrease of sea ice since a century – actual levels of local extension are the same, or even still a bit more, than in the ’20-’30-’40ies in this area – while the ice off Alaska and Siberia is fastly decreasing during summers).

I posted this at de smog blog (PR watch site) in the story “Skeptics’ Journal Publishes Plagiarist’s Paper”

There’s a link to the PDF where Dr. Mashey delves into the E&E paper by Dr. Schulte I think everyone here will find it an entertaining read about things and perceptions and the like. I only ended up there after seeing them argue about it on deltoid, and thought maybe rather than get into with them there, I’d just post on the site with the story.

So enjoy, I don’t know if it will get through there.

————————————

Nice study. It takes PR implementation in general and delves into it, and at the same time applies the exercise to global warming as an attack on skeptics.

BTW, you have a grammer error in the document at the start “…by widespread use of the Internet, which can quickly propagating…”

But an odd way to start this train moving in 2004 in that Science essay. If you don’t search for ‘AGW’ or ‘human’ or ‘anthropogenic’ in your search terms, how can you see if “there’s little or no serious disagreement with the basic idea of AGW”? “Global climate change” is not “Anthropogenic global warming”.

Take the first hit in Google scholar; it’s about modeling plant growth:

Global climate change and terrestrial net primary production

A process-based model was used to estimate global patterns of net primary production and soil nitrogen cycling for contemporary climate conditions and current atmospheric C02 concentration. Over half of the global annual net primary production was estimated to occur in the tropics, with most of the production attributable to tropical evergreen forest. The effects of C02 doubling and associated climate changes were also explored. The responses in tropical and dry temperate ecosystems were dominated by C02, but those in northern and moist temperate ecosystems reflected the effects of temperature on nitrogen availability.

I don’t disagree with the “basic idea of AGW” I’m quite sure with 7 billion people and our stuff and energy use, it is warming. It’s obvious humans change the climate of the globe. So I don’t disagree with the consensus.

But I could still create or assist in creating the above paper (and many others) without accepting that the anomaly trend accurately reflects any warming (or is in and of itself correct), and also believe that the IPCC in particular (and hence “the literature” in general) overstates the role of greenhouse gases in general (and carbon dioxide in particular) compared to land-use changes.

Or in other words, I agree that

Human activities—primarily burning of fossil fuels and changes in land cover—are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents or properties of the surface that absorb or scatter radiant energy.

I can even tentativly agree with this, arguendo:

“In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

“warming” meaning a rise in the anomaly trend, that could reflect the increase in energy budget in some way; too little, just right, too much, but certainly a general idea of the change from the base period of about 5% of 14 C when you lump together the entire planet.

All in all, there is little, if any, to establish a cause/effect relationship between gases that absorb and re-emit IR and interact on a physical and energy basis with gases that don’t with doing anything other than turning energy into heat, not with net increases due to those interactions.

But as I said, I believe it is warming. I disagree with attaching any kind of certainty to saying “more greenhouse gases=higher anomaly” much less “carbon dioxide=warming”

Now, which of those do you believe and which don’t you? Then you might know why I have doubts and am not willing to put my faith that the anomaly trend is showing me how much it’s “warming” nor to accept that greenhouse gases are the main cause, or even one at all.

In the article that I downloaded, David Vaughan stated that “much of the continent is not warming and some parts are even cooling”. But he and the others quickly affirmed that GLOBAL Warming is the cause of the collapse. One peninsula has warmed a little and we have GLOBAL Warming??? And these people are Ph.D’s?

Climate scientists who want to know how average temperatures on Antarctica might be changing must wrestle with the fact that ground-based weather stations are few and far between, especially in the continent’s high-altitude interior.

I thought that’s what “homogogenization” was supposed to take care of. Isn’t that the reason GISS shows a little warming trend vs. the other measurements since 2000—because Hansen does a “better” job of measuring Arctic warming because of his ability to extrapolate from sparse measuring stations? If that’s good enough for the Arctic, why not down South?

#324,
The problem with your links is that they don’t give the required answer. Therefore data and graphics needed to be tweaked so that a “warming” of as little as .05 degrees C would show up red. It’s the scientific method. I learned that in the book “The Assault on Reason by Al Gore.”

Filippo–
One of the problems with looking at Antarctic colorized temperature change images is that you need to know where the volcanos are, whether or not they are active and whether the amount of activity has varied.

I have some notion where they are– but know nothing about the rest. Because the whole “volcano” issue is in the air, someone who knows, who both sides trusts, needs to write a decent article about this. (Preferably with some quantitative information about dates/ levels of activity etc.)

However, the period compared is actually 2007 compared to 1981, or 26 years. If you go to the GISS calculator on the site cited below and set it for 20 years and compare the 2007 annual anomaly to 1988, you will see that the Antarctic has cooled .04C in “two decades”. In fact if you compare 1955 to 2007, you will find in the GISS data a cooling of greater than 2.2C for land in the Antarctic region with some warming on parts of the peninsula. (Yes, warming would be shown if you chose 1987 in the above, but I like my cherries chilled.)

Whether computing the last year of the series in the first figure based on the anomaly recorded so far was right or wrong, that’s what they’ve been doing up to now. As they admit themselves, the change in methodology only responds to their desire to hide a marked cooling that was increasingly evident and that now is just a bit less marked.

In fact, if you read their explanation carefully, all Jones et al are saying is that, should 2008 continue as cool as it is now, the conclusion that the temperatures have dropped markedly in recent years will be unavoidable.

True believers make the worst debaters. This is because they assume a huge amount of supporting data “must exist” to cover whatever claim they repeat from the commnet threads of UberWarmy.com or wherever they get their latest rhetorical easter egg.

Mikel, I must say that the uncorrected graph did look “too good to be true”. The error they made was very silly, but obviously has been going on for some time. Doubtless when January 2007 was warm and caused a disproportionately high point at the end of the smoothed graph a year ago nobody bothered to point that out.

Even as it stands the smoothed 21 point binomial filter shows that we are at present on a cooling trend.

A clever piece of filtering. Note the monthly anomally graph show the dive below the ’61 – ’90 average. The binomial filter acts like a high frequency band blocker and leaves only the low frequency temperature anomalies in place. They have been ‘open’ about what they have done and you can still see the recent plummet to below normal.

The scientists estimate the level of uncertainty in the measurements is between 2-3 degrees Celsius.

The devils in the details. The 1982 to 2004 image has a scale from -.2 to +.2 while the 1981 to 2007 image has a scale of -.1 to .1 . So in three years the number on parts the mainland has gone from -.2 to something like +.05 and the area to the west of the Antarctic peninsula has gone from something like +.2 to +.05. And these are the rates not the actual temperatures. Temperature differentials moderating anyone?

On another note, I just started Ruddiman’s newish book, “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum.” Fantastic! I am only a 1/4 way in, but it strikes me that if his hypothesis is correct … then climate must be fairly sensitive to C02 and CH4. Otherwise, we’d be squawking about the growth of glaciers in Canada right now … and not about the collapse of an ice shelf in Antarctica.

I was also thinking about Roy Spencer … and about how he describes himself as a “climate optimist”. He apparently accepts that AGW is occurring … however, he believes that the climate is more resilient than do the consensus scientists. In short, he (must?) believes that the earth has a sort of stable state of climate … that is not subject to sudden or unpredictable changes. Does that make Spencer a faith based climatologist? If not, by what process or mechanism does climate remain stable? Finally, does a stable state view of climate, if you will, jive with the undisputed record of climate change in the earth’s history?

It’s common to think that AGW is real but either overstated, non-cataclismic, or both.

We have plenty of historical evidence that the earth’s climate is not “stable.” However, we also have plenty of historical evidence that life on earth is resilient through warmer temps, higher CO2 levels, etc. I doubt Spencer views climate as stable (at least not on large time scales), but possibly ascribes to the hypothesis (as many do) that there are dampening effects within nature which would limit how far AGW can go. He may also ascribe to the hypothesis (as many do) that natural variability in climate change can and will dominate over human impacts.

I just started Ruddiman’s newish book, “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum.” Fantastic! I am only a 1/4 way in, but it strikes me that if his hypothesis is correct … then climate must be fairly sensitive to C02 and CH4.

If his hypothesis is correct, then GHG have been stabilizing the climate for millenia. You can’t have it both ways and remain honest. My personal intuition, I can’t call it a conclusion, is that humans are a climatotropic species, always have been, and that up to now the changes have been beneficial. There is no real evidence that future changes won’t remain beneficial.

Fair warning though. Ruddiman’s conclusions are based on model outputs, not some independent line of evidence, so no independent assessment of the sensitivity of the climate to various GHG can be drawn from his work.

BTW, the IPCC says that this interglacial is going to last 40 thousand years or so, so the ‘consensus’ position is that the Holocene did not need the little kick from GHG to maintain the stability. So Eric, you are going against the sum of all scientific knowledge.

You’d have to define “net stability.” I don’t consider a climate history of going in-and-out of ice ages, a sea level rise of 120m since the last glacial maximum, etc, to indicate a “stable” climate.

In slight relation to your NYT article, I spotted a new headline: “Thick ice hinders controversial seal hunt” http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080328/wl_canada_nm/canada_seals_col . My guess is that it will get very little attention for the “thick ice” and that the controversey of seal hunting will get far more attention (as they did in the article). The article doesn’t have any quotes from climate scientists or researchers about the ice. However, I would expecta far different approach to reporting (and more widespread) were the ice unusually thin. I could also imagine folks blaming AGW for how easy it is to hunt seals thanks to the thin ice (a la the “drowing polar bears”).

If his hypothesis is correct, then GHG have been stabilizing the climate for millenia. You can’t have it both ways and remain honest. My personal intuition, I can’t call it a conclusion, is that humans are a climatotropic species, always have been, and that up to now the changes have been beneficial. There is no real evidence that future changes won’t remain beneficial.

I agree. However, is it unreasonable to conclude that what has proven to be a source of stability to date (i.e., GHGs leading to stable warmth in the Holocene) could now be turning into a source of instability? In other words … stable warming thus far has been good … however, increased and/or accelerated warming could now turn ugly … particularly if weather patterns (i.e., crop patterns) change radically or more quickly than we can handle i.e., producing net negative impacts. Think water on that score too.

As for the basic grounds for Ruddiman’s hypothesis, there are 2 key pieces of evidence. The first is from the Vostok ice. He noticed that methane and C02 levels were rising … where by past patterns and cycles … both should be falling. He also observed that we are in an orbital solar minimum … and should be falling into the next ice age (or already in it)… if observed past patterns hold and remain true. None of that is based on models.

Having said that, Ruddiman has run his parameters through models and observed glaciers forming in Canada … which is a sensible exercise.

One other point … he also theorizes that plagues may have caused C02 and methane to drop … causing cooling such as the LIA. I have not read that far yet, however. But, if that is the case, claimate would appear to be very sensitive to human activity (or the lack thereof), indeed.

he also theorizes that plagues may have caused C02 and methane to drop

I always thought this part was nonsense. I will throw him a bone though and give my own personal theory of what could have contributed to the LIA. Potash production. Potash was widely produced in Europe and North America. The entire hardwood forest of the Northeastern American continent was burned in the course of 400 years to produce potash, which was used in the treatment of wool and the production of glass. It was the most important industrial chemical in that era. Its production through burning trees was ceased in about 1850, when it began to be mined. Imagine the climate effects of 400 years of forest fires. Look for potassium in the ice cores for validation.

But still his climate claims are based on models run with the parameterizations that you mention. As for his claims about “orbital solar minimums” I can’t believe he used that term, but if you are talking about Milankovich forcings, look at my link from Steve above. Ruddiman is interesting, but his work does not add to the knowledge of climate dynamics, it incorporates the consensus. It can’t be uses to prove the consensus.

I find it interesting that AGW, which I do believe is happening, has resulted in a mindset that seems to have been cultivated on purpose. This is proven to me by the phrases used by “both sides” of the debate. Instead of talking about a rising anomaly trend, it seems to be assumed that this equates to temperature. So everyone talks about temperature. Instead of talking about population and technology (or land use changes and the burning of fossil fuels), it seems to be assumed that this equates to greenhouse gases. Or, in fact, carbon dioxide equivalent. So everyone talks about carbon dioxide.

Is it warming, due to human activity? Of course. As far as I’m concerned (my opinion is) that it is obvious, and it’s also obvious what the cause is.

How that gets into the mindset of “carbon dioxide rising is causing it to warm, and the warming is dangerous, and if we lower and remove carbon dioxide, it will slow or stop warming” seems calculated.

How good a proxy are greenhouse gas levels and the global mean temperature anomaly trend for the AGW?

I don’t know. Nobody knows.

So we shouldn’t talk about this in terms as if we know what’s going on. So I’ll just answer the preceding discussion as: Climate is stable long term, but variable very long term. We don’t have good enough data to know what the future holds.

Eric, it is ever a source of disappointment to me that your first resort when a question comes up is to run back to RealClimate. I am still waiting for the first instance where they shed light rather than fog on any subject. How about thinking about it yourself? I think the IPCC is full of it on the Stage 11 type interglacial. I don’t believe that there is anything like enough supporting evidence to make that claim. I think though that the claim has to be made for rhetorical reasons. That is, if we credit GHG with saving us from mass starvation, then how do we demonise it for future potential harm if its history is one of unambiguous benefit? Why should we cut GHGs if our reward is an ice age? These are the kinds of “findings” that create skeptics like myself. I wish they could see that.

Then again Yorick, the recent SEPP paper says that any significan warming will melt ice; but in actuality, ice would and has melted even when it’s not warming. It melts any time the ice gets over 0 C, which doesn’t require warming, just weather/climate over 0 C.

This links back to the post on mindsets above; even “skeptics” are close to the mainstream; those authors think it’s warming and talk in the lingo of melting ice and such.

Yorick, Ruddiman only uses toy models. No GCM has ever gone into and out of an ICe Age. The “consensus” is against Ruddiman but hardly the “sum of all knowledge”. I thought that the IPCC arm-waved through the interglacial issue, but that doesn’t mean that Ruddiman is right either. Lots of big interesting questions and no cause to jump on Eric merely for chatting about Ruddiman.

Tas21_r=filter(F,1,Tae);
Tas21_r=Tas21_r(21:end);
close all
plot(Tas21_r,’b’)

hold on

plot(Tas21,’r’)

Almost exact match . Brohan’s end-point smoothing is thus based on

Tae=[ones(10,1)*Ta(1,1); Ta ; ones(10,1)*Ta(end,1)];

ie. pad the series with end-point values. As I showed here, http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2541#comment-187403 these climate-scientific smoothing methods are extremely sensitive to measurement noise ( and wrong anyway, but that’s a longer story). And in the earlier version they padded with average of 2 monthly values ( Jan08, Feb08) to obtain annual average of 08. Use formula of recursive average to verify that this is equal to taking average of Jan-Feb as full 12-month average. And now, as Jan-Feb happened to be cold months, they realized that their procedure sucks. Along goes Mann_GRL04, and Brohan’s smoothed uncertainties…

Just like trees, coral, forms growth rings, which both the thickness and density are measured to give a growth rate.

In “Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Coral Reefs and Other Marine Calcifiers” of 2006 (http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/acidification.shtml), they *show* this graph, and comment on how it was made, but unlike the rest of the disaster-scenario 96 page document, FAIL TO COMMENT on its obvious implications (that growth has been slowly falling until 1940 when CO2 started going way up, AND THEN CORAL REEFS DID RATHER THE OPPOSITE OF SLOWING DOWN):

But elsewhere, hidden towards the end of the report, they do spit it out:

“If seawater chemistry was the only variable affecting calcification, then calcification records from corals and other organisms should show a decrease in calcification over the past century. While some individual calcification records from massive corals do reveal a decrease in calcification rate over the past century, on average they do not, and this is believed to reflect the effects of other variables on calcification.”

They claim a correlation with temperature. But coral reefs *should* like more acidity if they actually feed on bicarbonate instead of carbonate, as they are said to actually do, so that still leaves “other calcifiers.”

Steve,
I hope you know that I meant “the sum of all knowledge” ironically. No one could possiblly mean that literally, unless you are flogging a GCM, I guess.

Eric,
I hope you didn’t take my questions as jumping on your ideas. I was just chatting too, I like Ruddiman’s ideas. Discussion advances understanding, even getting your ideas “jumped on” does. After all, you could tear right back into me and demolish my thinking.

Recent research has implicated both the UVR (280 – 400 nm) and PAR (400-700 nm) components of solar radiation in various responses of coral reefs to global change. Changes in solar UV reaching the coral reefs have been caused by human alterations of atmospheric composition such as depletion of the ozone layer. In addition, changes in the composition of the water over the reefs can have important effects on the penetration of UV and visible light to the reef surface. Such changes can be caused by shifts in runoff of UV-absorbing substances from land, clarification of the water under doldrum conditions associated with global warming and changes in organisms that live near coral reefs that produce sunlight-absorbing substances. This report
provides a review of past work that has been conducted on light exposure of coral reefs, in particular in the UV region.The report then describes a case study of factors that are affecting UV exposure of the coral reefs in the Florida Keys.

and then take weighted sum of those values (weights are in F, my previous post) to obtain a value 0.42 for 2007. And when you look at Brohan’s uncertainties, you’ll see that they assume that smoothed 2007 is as accurate as smoothed 1997. But for 1997 smoothed value, the ‘future’ data is available! And now they have announcement at http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/

We have recently corrected an error in the way that the smoothed time series of data were calculated. Data for 2008 were being used in the smoothing process as if they represented an accurate esimate of the year as a whole. This is not the case and owing to the unusually cool global average temperature in January 2008, the error made it look as though smoothed global average temperatures had dropped markedly in recent years, which is misleading.

I don’t have the deleted version of smoothed data, but I
assume they took Jan-Feb 08 average as whole year estimate,
mathematically equivalent to average of

and then this 08 value was fed to the smoothing algorithm, ie used to predict temperature of next 10 years. And then they finally realized that it is wrong to do, because Jan 08 happened to be a cold month. Smoothed 2007 remains in their website..

I’ve been listening to the Heartland Conference talks that they have on audio. I like how Craig Loehle calls himself a “shill” for the paper industry. You should listen to it. And some of the others too.

But this is terrible, because it means that the weighted mean they are using has about half its total weight from the current year. How stupid is that? They should use an exponential filter instead. Anyway, I never did take much stock of their graphs.

It was not immediately obvious in the discussions here and at RC, the effect, or effectiveness (or lack of) of your “simple” approach. As stated by one wise man, it is quite entertaining and instructive to watch the struggles of another ship in a storm, from the safe advantage of the shore. I was struck by the difference of the lack of critism for the “complicated” approach versus yours. It should have been the opposite. In my field, a simpler approach with simpler assumptions is often used as a tool to help prioritize spending, reasearch efforts, liklihood, etc. Your presentation of the straightforward approach with the assumptions and unknowns you had to deal with, made Mann’s claim, and the lack of rigour M&M0X proved, such a profound contrast (sticking with your convention not to say ludicrous). With all the ad hom attacks, some of the distinct advantages of a simpler approach, and what it showed of Mann and other papers was lost.

But what struck me is that temps in 1878 and a few earlier periods are even higher than the current 2008 anomalies.

GISS only goes back to 1880 so of course we miss some of the earlier warmer periods (albeit relatively short ones). The new 21 point binomial filter that Hadley is using totally eliminates these warm periods as well as the big drop through 2007.

The monthly unsmoothed chart is at the bottom of this page (error bars again mask some of the earlier warm periods but at least you can see it.)

For anyone to answer.
Why is it that temperature records from airports are being so readily discarded?
Contrary to the apparent scorn with which they are being treated, these measures are unbiased and used for flight safety – aircraft use them to calculate the length of take-off run etc. If they are inaccurate then for your sake if you are flying, you should identify where they are wrong so they can be corrected, you could die if the values are incorrect especially on a hot day or one approaching freezing. The observation sites are chosen to be in positions with minimal impact from buildings and runways and are probably less affected by their surroundings than other observations stations.

Because they are accurate in a current setting does not mean they are accurate in a historical context.

Ever been on a flight line? It’s the epitome of a heat island.

An airport that may have been a grass field 50 years ago is probably a massive concrete and asphalt complex today. Too, an airport that was on the outskirts of town thirty or even twenty years ago is probably and area of dense development today.

A good example is Centennial Airport just south of Denver. Thirty years ago, ther was nothing there but a single runway of 6000 feet. Today, it’s one of the busiest airports between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast.

But this is terrible, because it means that the weighted mean they are using has about half its total weight from the current year. How stupid is that? They should use an exponential filter instead. Anyway, I never did take much stock of their graphs

Trailing edge, no less. These guys are just plain idiotic sometimes. If it were simply an illustration in which smoothing were needed, that would be one thing… but these smoothed anomalies are what gets pushed as the actual data.

No kidding. Look at his energy budgets… all those assumptions and the whole fight is over less than 1 W/m^2.

Why do climate papers always have a bazillion (very scientific term, VST) authors? I’d never imagine any more than three, and the third is usually just someone that tossed an idea into the hat. Heck, even my last paper had my advisor listed only because he’s my advisor and reviewed the work.

Why do climate papers always have a bazillion (very scientific term, VST) authors? I’d never imagine any more than three, and the third is usually just someone that tossed an idea into the hat. Heck, even my last paper had my advisor listed only because he’s my advisor and reviewed the work.

The numbers game WRT the publish or perish syndrome. Quantity vs. quality. Not what you’ve authored or coauthored, but how many.

Re#377, also the more big names you throw at reviewers, the more likely one is to stick.

What’s most interesting in the papers with a bevy of names is that when they have a paper seriously dependent on statistical procedures, they don’t find it important or necessary to include (or at least consult and acknowledge) a statistician.

I haven’t read this paper (in “Risk Analysis”) yet but I would sure love to read the study that demonstrates the veracity of the first sentence of the abstract, particularily the claim that “…the mass media frequently portray the subject as one of great scientific controversy and debate”.
_______________________________________________

Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States
• Paul M. Kellstedt1*,
• Sammy Zahran2, and
• Arnold Vedlitz2
1Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA.
2Institute for Science, Technology and Public Policy, George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA.
*Address correspondence to Paul M. Kellstedt, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4348; tel: 979-845-3082; kellstedt@polisci.tamu.edu.
Abstract
Despite the growing scientific consensus about the risks of global warming and climate change, the mass media frequently portray the subject as one of great scientific controversy and debate. And yet previous studies of the mass public’s subjective assessments of the risks of global warming and climate change have not sufficiently examined public informedness, public confidence in climate scientists, and the role of personal efficacy in affecting global warming outcomes. By examining the results of a survey on an original and representative sample of Americans, we find that these three forces—informedness, confidence in scientists, and personal efficacy—are related in interesting and unexpected ways, and exert significant influence on risk assessments of global warming and climate change. In particular, more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has unexpected effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. These results have substantial implications for the interaction between scientists and the public in general, and for the public discussion of global warming and climate change in particular.

Those political scientists failed to recognize skepticism when they saw it. It makes sense that a skeptic, who thinks the role of CO2 has been exaggerated, would have a high level of understanding about global warming, have a high opinion of scientists in general, and not feel particularly responsible about the situation.

I wonder if they understood what they were measuring.
==========================================

Despite the growing scientific consensus about the risks of global warming and climate change, the mass media frequently portray the subject as one of great scientific controversy and debate.

Huh? Last time I check, MSM’s were going right along with the “growing” “consensus”. Are these people even aware that you need to provide evidence when you make a claim? Well, I suppose they take it for granted that everyone will take that statement to be true.

Why do climate papers always have a bazillion (very scientific term, VST) authors? I’d never imagine any more than three, and the third is usually just someone that tossed an idea into the hat. Heck, even my last paper had my advisor listed only because he’s my advisor and reviewed the work.

Okay, this is an interesting observation which I’ve just made. Year to year changes in global temperature can move up and down like crazy, and I think we can all agree that this has nothing to do with external forcing right? So, the greatest change from one year to the next was almost .4 C (.345 C). So if something natural can cause that change up or down in one year that means that, using it as an estimate for the range of internal variability (+-.345 C) I found that the Global temperature anomalies are just barely outside this range recently, at not at all if you allow for error bars.

Black is temperature anomaly, red are the error bars, and blue is plus or minus .345 C. So how do you rule out a random trend, and blame Humans? You don’t…

The numbers game WRT the publish or perish syndrome. Quantity vs. quality. Not what you’ve authored or coauthored, but how many.

Make it look like a consensus (in their own lunchtime).

I should have mentioned that this was a rhetorical question. They are purposefully inflating their publications number not to impress their schools, but to make it look like they are some kind of authorities. It is shameful.

You can take the abstract, replace the word “scientist” with “politician” (and so on for variations) and the abstract means much the same. The public are content to have a body of scientists in whose care and responsibility they can park the problem.

However, it is NOT my impression that the better informed scientists are less concerned. The better informed scientists are agitating for better science (and politics) as shown for example by CA being #1 science web site and by other observations.

Let me rephrase make the point in 382 slightly differently. There may be a cohort of skeptics whose opinions are so particular as to bias the whole sample. The study is otherwise counterintuitive. I’d guess their questions couldn’t tease out the subgroup of aware skeptics.
================================

Despite the growing scientific consensus about the risks of global warming and climate change, the mass media frequently portray the subject as one of great scientific controversy and debate.

I’d say both premises are false. There is no growing scientific consensus and the mass media do not portray AGW as being controversial.

Otherwise, the conclusions are what I would expect. Better informed and more scientifically knowlegeable people are less concerned about GW precisely because they are better informed, both about the warming that has occured and the likely consequences. People with low confidence in science and scientists feel that our scientific and technological driven society is somehow bad and dangerous and ‘ordinary’ people need to do something about it.

As much as I would like to believe that the TAM study verifies my own opinions of AGW, I suspect that the real lesson from the study is that it is flawed by the author’s preconceptions of the public’s faith in science.

This year the ice looks like it may not go out til May in this part of the lake, which is highly unusual, there are no records but nobody remembers such a late date. (I am going to start the record this year) Anyway, I was reading up on the subject and this fact came up about obersvations in a different part of the lake:

But the most remarkable part of the record is the occurrence of years in which the lake did not freeze over all winter. Over the 186 year record, the lake has not frozen over in 31 winters, 75% of which were since 1900, and almost half of them occurred since 1970

The part of the lake that they are observing did not freeze this year either. Then I looked at the web site for the Champlain Ferry and lo and belhold, it started continuous winter service near the point of observation in the ’70s. The ferryies are fitted out for ice breaking and maintain a swath of open wather a thousand yards wide as three boats run continuously. It doesn’t take long to notice that what keeps the lake from icing over are small patches of open water that catch with wind and break up the ice through wave action. I think this explains why we have had such a cold winter and yet the lake has not frozen (at the point of observation)

Ian W: Airports. They just need to know the general conditions around the runway, not what it would be if the runway wasn’t there. In addition, why would they care if it’s 58 or 62 but reading 60. I don’t think it’s all that critical. Maybe we could have a pilot chime in. :)

Why is it that temperature records from airports are being so readily discarded? Contrary to the apparent scorn with which they are being treated, these measures are unbiased and used for flight safety—aircraft use them to calculate the length of take-off run etc. If they are inaccurate then for your sake if you are flying, you should identify where they are wrong so they can be corrected, you could die if the values are incorrect especially on a hot day or one approaching freezing.

They are discarded (discounted) when using them to ascertain global temperature anomalies. Pilots use the current local airport temperatures, as you noted, to calculate take-off distance, based on the aircraft’s weight, along with the prevailing winds, and the aircraft’s performance capabilities, but could care less what that temperature was hours, days, or weeks ago.
—retired U.S. Naval aviator.

Actually many military airfields out in the boondocks with limited activity and no major towns nearby are probably just as good or better than the average weather station. Unfortunately many of these have been eliminated since the end of the cold war. I agree that major civilian fields in or near towns should be disregarded. After all what is needed at an airfield is the temperature a couple of meters above the (concrete or asphalt) runway, since that is where the wings and engines of the aircraft are.

In addition, why would they care if it’s 58 or 62 but reading 60. I don’t think it’s all that critical. Maybe we could have a pilot chime in.

It can be critical depending on circumstances, I recall one rather warm morning in Maine when a couple of degrees one way or the other made the difference between clearing the trees at the other end of the lake or not ( I left my buddy fishing that afternoon and went back that evening to pick him up when it was cooler).
For a Skyhawk floatplane 20->30ºC increases the distance to clear a 50′ obstacle by ~300′

393 Sam U
Most of the time, it is not that critical. However, sometimes it is very important. If it is raining, knowing whether it is 29F or 34F can be very important. If it is cool and vary damp, knowing what the true dry and wet bulb values are can be critical re fog.

Yes, temperature isn’t the entire story for aircraft just like it isn’t for climate or weather. But it’s situational; too high or low by 2 degrees isn’t an issue; unless it’s 31 out and it says 33. But then you’d have other sensors or could look to make sure the wings aren’t iced etc anyway, ‘cuz maybe the 33 isn’t correct. It could be colder or warmer where you are than where the sensor is, also of course. In the case of clearing an object, if you had plenty of space you probably wouldn’t care. I was more thinking of an international airport and 747s. Although I’d guess they have their own temperature sensors…. :D

New Climate Model?
Leave it to Google with its unprecedented number of processors, incomprehensible volumes of storage and massive quantities of data to invent a new way to predict the future including (dare we hope) climate.

Using MATE’s™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

In the case of clearing an object, if you had plenty of space you probably wouldn’t care. I was more thinking of an international airport and 747s. Although I’d guess they have their own temperature sensors….

They do but it doesn’t always work, the Air Florida crash into the Potomac comes to mind! That was a a 737 which didn’t have its engine anti-icing switched on in a snow storm resulting in false sensor readings.

RE399…James … what an uttermost coincidence of DEVILOPMENT
…they can present this now …April 1st…They are not “down
under” we are, as there is no upside down in space, right??
Due to Telia-Cogent dispute many US sites were unaccessiblablable
during some weeks for yours truly…(Both true and inventive??)

RE400
Andrew, our good Pat Michaels is devastating, pity that
not that many people read WCR….Conclusion: To be a
true alarmist, whatever matter, there is no other date
than April 1st….But how sane are you then??

Climate models and satellite observations both indicate that the total amount of water in the atmosphere will increase at a rate of 7% per kelvin of surface warming. However, the climate models predict that global precipitation will increase at a much slower rate of 1 to 3% per kelvin. A recent analysis of satellite observations does not support this prediction of a muted response of precipitation to global warming. Rather, the observations suggest that precipitation and total atmospheric water have increased at about the same rate over the past two decades.

The Air Florida crash did not result because the crew did not know what the correct temperature was.
The icing caused them to not know their correct windspeed.
Since it was snowing heavily at the time, It’s kind of hard to imagine that the crew did not know that the temperature was below freezing.

I always wondered about the effect of evaporative cooling. It seems to me like the whole positive feedback picture is coming apart, first with Spencer et al. just recently and now this. Instead of asking by what mechanism is climate stable, perhaps we should ask by what mechanism it is unstable (that’s for Eric)…

STAFFAN LINDSTROEM, yes, it is a shame more people don’t read WCR, but maybe people are more interested in these kinds of stories than the truth. I have to say, I’ve heard people rant about some of the papers they write on, forgeting that they are just reporting what is in the literature and what the Authors said.

The Air Florida crash did not result because the crew did not know what the correct temperature was.
The icing caused them to not know their correct windspeed.
Since it was snowing heavily at the time, It’s kind of hard to imagine that the crew did not know that the temperature was below freezing.

They knew their airspeed however it didn’t give them the required lift because of ice on the wings. Even though it was snowing the pilots didn’t switch on the engine anti-icing system(!) and the engine pressure sensors weren’t reading correctly so while they thought the engines were at full thrust they weren’t.

I think 408 is right, but then the latent heat is carried aloft, bypassing the heaviest “greenhouse effect” near the surface when it is released much nearer the tropopause as the preciptiation happens. So it is not like all heat should be treated equally. I assume however that the models do address this simple effect. You would think though that if total water vapor in the atmosphere were to increase, this would be the heat equivalent of the rising sea level that got stuck in the dams. Some of it would semi-permanently disappear. I am just having a hard time viewing Monckton’s objection as a strong one.

Didn’t I see data somewhere that showed that water vapor did not increase monotonically, but instead has been varying by some unknown mechanism?

Rather, the observations suggest that precipitation and total atmospheric water have increased at about the same rate over the past two decades

These seems to me to imply that the increase in water vapor happened as predicted.

Air Florida was caused by human error due to inexperience and a failure to follow proper procedures. They didn’t know their airspeed while they were crashing, but yes, it was a lack of thrust on the ground that did it, the engine presure ratio readings were high.

The details. The wings were deiced. Due to difficulty backing up (the tug kept slipping on the ice) they used reverse thrust and snow and ice went into the engines. The reverse thrust didn’t work and they ended up tugging it back with a tug with snow chains. Then they sat for almost an hour waiting for the runway, but the pilot decided not to go back for more deicing. So we have a plane with snow and ice on the airfoils, cold engines and even though it was freezing and snowing, they didn’t turn on the anti-ice systems. Then, they got too close to a DC-9 while taxing, hoping the engines from it would melt them, only that made the icing even worse. Neither pilot had much experience flying in snow and cold.

So, the EPR thrust indicators had a false high reading about 15% too high (2 instead of 1.7) The plane went a half mile longer before takeoff than it should have. The first officer told the captain he didn’t think they were getting as much power as the instruments were telling them, but the captain basically ignored him. The captain was inexperienced and in a hurry and there was another aircraft on final approach they wanted to get out of the way of.

It got up to 352 feet, 30 seconds in the air. The plane stalled 2 seconds before crashing into the 14th street bridge about 1400 meters from the end of the runway.

The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of this accident was pilot error stating that the flight crew’s failure to use engine anti-ice during ground operation and takeoff, their decision to take off with snow/ice on the airfoil surfaces of the aircraft, and the captain’s failure to reject the takeoff during the early stage when his attention was called to anomalous engine instrument readings.

“Contributing to the accident were the prolonged ground delay between de-icing and the receipt of ATC takeoff clearance during which the aircraft was exposed to continual precipitation, the known inherent pitch up characteristics of the B-737 aircraft when the leading edge is contaminated with even small amounts of snow or ice, and the limited experience of the flight crew in jet transport winter operations.”

Climatologist Roy Spencer, author of Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor, tells John J. Miller that while global warming is real, its causes are not known. “The truth is that we don’t have the right observations, in let’s say the last thirty or forty years, to know whether our most recent warming is natural or manmade.”

The investigation of the Florida Flight 90 crash concluded that the combination of the crew’s use of thrust reverse on the ground, and their failure to active the engine anti-ice system, caused the crash. By failing to activate the engine anti-ice, the large amouts of snow and ice that were sucked into the engines during reverse thrust use was allowed to remain there, unchallenged. The ice buildup on the compressor inlet pressure probe, the probe which measures engine power, can cause false readings, as was the case here. The indications in the cockpit showed an Engine Pressure Ratio of 2.04, while the power plants were in reality only producing 1.70 EPR, or about 70% of available power. The combination of the ice covered wings and low power caused an immediate stall on takeoff that resulted in 74 lives lost.

Well, yes, kind of. Latent heat of vaporization/condensation of water is 2260 KJ/kg, latent heat of fusion (icing/melting) is 334 KJ/kg. So, portion of water vapor in atmosphere created by ice sublimation carries additional 334 KJ/kg cooling effect on surface. Same additional 334 KJ/kg cooling effect is created by precipitation in form of snow and hail.

“The truth is that we don’t have the right observations, in let’s say the last thirty or forty years, to know whether our most recent warming is natural or manmade.”

I’ve been running around … asking for possible natural sources that could explain the warming… and also overcome the UFO/Bigfoot test. However, I aint seen one yet … because they all turn out to be elaborate hand waiving and/or mere hokum. In any case, any credible suggestions for a natural source are welcome. And, don’t get all huffy-puffy just because I asked.

I’ve been running around … asking for possible natural sources that could explain the warming… and also overcome the UFO/Bigfoot test. However, I aint seen one yet … because they all turn out to be elaborate hand waiving and/or mere hokum. In any case, any credible suggestions for a natural source are welcome. And, don’t get all huffy-puffy just because I asked.

From your efforts on station queries I guess I have a hard time viewing you running around asking questions about global warming, but if you are so inclined, you might want to ask more specific questions such as given that Total Warming = AGW + NGW + UTM (Uncertainity in Temperature Measurement) how much is estimated to be due to each part and how much certainty do we have for our estimate of each part. You might also want to keep track of your answers from those who are admittedly in the consensus and check the variations therein.

Eric, when you start off by saying that its a long big foot list, why should I bother making a reasonable suggestion? I already know ahead of time you’ll dismiss it. You want to believe in AGW so you can’t bring yourself to take other possibilities seriously.

To Eric McFarland, the increased warming is coming from the ever increasing content of Methane, a potent GHG, in the atmosphere.

If you are knowledgeable about the science of global warming, you will understand what is wrong with that statement. A Google search might not even give you the answer given how the field has developed.

I’ve been running around … asking for possible natural sources that could explain the warming… and also overcome the UFO/Bigfoot test. However, I aint seen one yet … because they all turn out to be elaborate hand waiving and/or mere hokum. In any case, any credible suggestions for a natural source are welcome. And, don’t get all huffy-puffy just because I asked.

Uh, Eric, what about the MWP and LIA? Are you blaming mankind on those rapid and significant climate changes? Are you claiming those changes didn’t happen. If so, you are the skeptic. LOL.

rE #417 **I’ve been running around … asking for possible natural sources that could explain the warming… and also overcome the UFO/Bigfoot test. However, I aint seen one yet … because they all turn out to be elaborate hand waiving and/or mere hokum. In any case, any credible suggestions for a natural source are welcome. And, don’t get all huffy-puffy just because I asked.**
Can you give us “credible” MEASUREMENT of the warming cased by GHG or CO2?
I have a graph of and increase in TV sets which parallels the increase in temperature.(until a few years ago)

Eric thinks in rhetoric, not logic, the othere word for that on a site devoted to logic is “trolling”. I wonder if relativity would have passed Eric’s “bigfoot” test when it first came out. Or continental drift?

If you squeeze your eyes shut tightly enough, it is easy to convince yourself that everything you don’t want to see is hokum. There is solid scientific evidence behind all of the alternative explanations of GW. The fact that you don’t wish to believe in any of them, doesn’t make them any less relevant.

425 yorick
Your mention of Continental Drift reminds me that this theory was made fun of by the experts in the early 1950’s.
As a student at the time, rooming with several geologists, I mentioned that I believed in it and was laughed at uproariously because the Geology establishment consensus position was that it was myth.
So much for consensus….

But Pat, don’t you realize that Continental Drift is part of the AGW mythology, made so by Gore? AGW=”Outlandish only a decade ago” and “convinced virtually everyone who looked objectively at the data”. Never mind that it was taken seriously when proposed by Calender in the 1930’s…

Hmm…Continental Drift was first proposed by a Meteorologist, and the evidence for it was mostly paleoclimatological and paleontological, rather than geological…and people complained about a lack of a viable physical mechanism…Now what does this remind you of?

Steve: No more about continental drift please – if you must, talk about it elsewhere.

There is solid scientific evidence behind all of the alternative explanations of GW.

So they’re all true? :)

Steve: Boris, I’m interested in a detailed exposition of conventional theory, which derives 2.5 deg C from physics without the intervention of GCMs, which appear to introduce a variety of intractable issues that may needlessly complicate the salient issues. believe that I’ve asked you this before. I believe that you previously referred me to something from the 1950s which was not directly endorsed in IPCC AR4 as still being authoritative. Personally, I’m much more interested in understanding mainstream theory and am only interested in alternative theories afterwards. In your opinion, what is the best such reference. I’d be quite happy to discuss the reference that you provide.

And if we had responded….Well, you refused to explain the “Bigfoot/UFO test” so why should I bother? But since Spencer brought this up, perhaps I can offer this:

the publishing of alternative explanations is hindered by the fact that our long-term global climate observations (e.g. of cloud characteristics) are not good enough to measure the small changes that might offer an alternative explanation for our current warmth.

Science can not deal with what we can not measure. But scientists could at least admit to incomplete knowledge — unfortunately, most of them do not.

and

Some scientists who believe in manmade global warming have asked me, “But what else could be causing the warmth?” Note that this is arguing, not from the evidence, but from a lack of evidence.

and

I predict that further research will reveal some other cause for most of the warming we have experienced since the 1970’s — for instance, a change in some feature of the sun’s activity; or, a small change in cloudiness resulting from a small change in the general circulation of the atmosphere (such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, ‘PDO’).

Also, a quote from Lindzen for you, from the Lindzen/Rhamstorf exchange:

I will leave the discussion of these matters to others, because the main competing process has been omitted from the list. Rahmstorf does finally acknowledge this by referring to the possibility of a warming trend that arises by chance from an unforced internal variability of the climate system, which cannot be completely ruled out but has to be
considered highly unlikely. To claim that such variability (associated with various indices such
as El Nino/La Nina, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation) is
rendered unlikely because it occurs by chance (ie, is unpredictable) is rather illogical9. In point
of fact, Tsonis et al (2007) are able to account for the changes in global mean temperature over
the past 100 years exactly in this manner.

The note for 9 says:

There is even a joke about the illogic of such an argument that is attributed to Richard
Feynman. Feynman walks into a class late, and announces to the class that he has encountered
something astounding. While walking through a parking lot, he saw a car with the plate number
186CSC. What, he asks the class, do they think the odds are of seeing that precise number?

RE 417. Eric. Pretend for a second that you are a lawyer. Pretend. For a second.

Now, the prosecution has accused mankind of causing this crime. And you are defense counsel.

I understand and appreciate that you have no familiarity with the law. But Mankind stands
accused. Where does the burden of proof lie and what is the standard we should apply?

hehe. To the matter at hand.

1. IS the planet warming? Bring your evidence. Establish a chain of custody for this evidence.
2. Is this warming out of the ordinary? Again, bring your evidence, your expert witnesses, and provide full discovery, etc etc
3. Is mankind the Proximate cause? blah blah blah

This would be a fun TV show. the great climate trial. could you convict man?
Could you?

Fun thought experentment. could you convict mankind of global warming? If you cant, then why stick us in the jail of your regulations? because you can?

Weather not climate, UK again braces for more spring snow. Last time we had some towards the end of March, the Met wrote it off as being only white at Easter because Easter was so early, never mind that widespread lowland snow is unusual for UK at the end of March. Last April we were enjoying temperatures in the mid 20s (mid 70s F).

I’ve been running around … asking for possible natural sources that could explain the warming… and also overcome the UFO/Bigfoot test. However, I aint seen one yet … because they all turn out to be elaborate hand waiving and/or mere hokum. In any case, any credible suggestions for a natural source are welcome. And, don’t get all huffy-puffy just because I asked.

But isn’t this backward? Wouldn’t one assume it were natural unless shown otherwise? Reminds me of putting one’s ear to the ground, hearing horses stampeding and assuming “it must be zebras” (unless, of course, you are in Africa where it probably is Zebras).

MS. SCHAKOWSKY. Well, let me ask you this. Dr. Mann has published dozens of study since the original hockey stick study and as I said earlier, beginning in 2003 he reformulated the statistical methods. Do you take into account these later studies in your report?
DR. WEGMAN. I have read his later studies. I was not asked about his later studies. I think as science iterates, things do get better, but as I indicated before, one of the unfortunate aspects of this overall situation with Dr. Mann and his colleagues, my attack is not an attack at all. It is simply trying to lay out what I perceive to be a true statement. I think it is unfortunate that rather than moving on and saying gosh, I made a mistake and here is the better situation, here is a better approach, there continues to be a defense which is captured in his web log called realclimate.org.

MS. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you. I just want to read to you from that same–it says “But as Dr. Thompson’s thermometer show,” and so it is not based on Dr. Mann. This is a different source which our staff had confirmed with Al Gore. I just want to make–
MR. STEARNS. I respect that.
MS. SCHAKOWSKY. –that point. I know, but your question wanted to reinforce the notion that this was based on this false or inaccurate Dr. Mann study–
MR. STEARNS. Well, I think–
MS. SCHAKOWSKY. –and it is not.

Read the transcript. Mann et al has been officially politically discredited, according to both parties, for 18mths. Don’t be spoonfed by the Mann appologists, read the original. It damns him completely.

Weather not climate, UK again braces for more spring snow. Last time we had some towards the end of March, the Met wrote it off as being only white at Easter because Easter was so early, never mind that widespread lowland snow is unusual for UK at the end of March. Last April we were enjoying temperatures in the mid 20s (mid 70s F).

Both my sisters were married in the UK on Easter Monday (more than a decade apart), it snowed both days, the earliest was 31st March.
In June ’75 ~3″ of snow stopped play at a cricket match between Lancs. & Derbyshire (I had planned to go!), a few days earlier it had been in the 70’s, two weeks later a drought started which was to last for two years. That’s the UK weather for you!

April 2, 2008 – The accuracy of computer models that predict climate change over the coming decades has been the subject of debate among politicians, environmentalists, and even scientists. A new study by meteorologists at the University of Utah shows that current climate models are quite accurate and can be valuable tools for those seeking solutions on reversing global warming trends. Most of these models project a global warming trend that amounts to about 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years.

Although model-based projections of future climate are now more credible than ever before, the authors note they have no way to say exactly how reliable those projections are. There are simply too many unknowns involved in the future evolution of climate, such as how much humans will curb their future greenhouse gas emissions.

Eric: You mean possible natural sources other than people. Last time I checked, we are part of nature. What possibly could explain the anomaly trend rise? There’s plenty of possible answers. Just because somebody doesn’t like the answer, or can’t think of other ones, doesn’t mean anything.

John Lang: Come on, everyone knows it’s not methane, it’s CFCs.

Gerald Machnee: I have a nice fit between world population and the anomaly trend. It couldn’t be television sets.

Andrew: Seeing licence plate 186CSC? 1000*26*26*26 is the answer, ignoring vanity plates and vechicles (like government ones) that use another system. That’s over 17 million to 1 And yet, it happened! Wow.

The conclusion from the actual paper…today’s models are better than yesterday’s models. Big deal.

Using a composite measure of model performance, we objectively determined the ability of three generations of models to simulate present-day mean climate. Current models are certainly not perfect, but we found that they are much more realistic than their predecessors. This is mostly related to the enormous progress in model development that took place over the last decade, which is partly due to more sophisticated model parameterizations, but also to the general increase in computational resources, which allows for more thorough model testing and higher model resolution. Most of the current models not only perform better, they are also no longer flux corrected. Both – improved performance and more physical formulation – suggest that an increasing level of confidence can be placed in model based predictions of climate. This, however, is only true to the extent that the performance of a model in simulating present mean climate is related to the ability to make reliable forecasts of long-term trends. It is to hope that these advancements will enhance the public credibility of model predictions and help to justify the development of even better models.

Given the many issues that complicate model validation, it is perhaps not too surprising that the present study has some limitations. First, we note the caveat that we were only concerned with the time mean state of climate. Higher moments of climate, such as temporal variability, are probably equally as important for model performance, but we were unable to investigate these. Another critical point is the calculation of the
performance index. For example, it is unclear how important climate variability is compared to the mean climate, exactly which the optimum selection of climate variables is, and how accurate the used validation data are. Another complicating issue is that error information contained in the selected climate variables is partly redundant. Clearly, more work is required to answer the above questions, and it is to hope that the present study will stimulate further research in the design of more robust metrics. For example, a future improved version of the index should consider possible redundancies and assign appropriate weights to errors from different climate variables. However, we do not think that our specific choices in this study affect our overall conclusion that there has been a measurable and impressive improvement in climate model performance over the past decade.

However, we do not think that our specific choices in this study affect our overall conclusion that there has been a measurable and impressive improvement in climate model performance over the past decade.

The past decade? But we all know shorter than 30 years is not meaningful when it comes to matters involving climate. Who are they trying to fool? They’re just cherry picking 1998.:)

I wonder if the authors of that paper have even read the relevant literature out recently? Until this issue is finally resolved, the models are clearly useless. And this issue, to. And I could go on and on…

Up until the early 20th century science was not peer-reviewed. 19th century journals were nothing more than proceedings of societies with a low circulation and without perr review, most papers were direct lecture notes from the society meetings. Later profit making journals took over (eg Annalen der Physik) again without peer review. Few people could afford a personal subscription and had to turn to a library to read.

Face it, the internet is the democratisation of science, bad science is of all times (remember Phlogiston?)

Richard, I am not sure, but the NH coverage goes to 82.5 but the SH coverages only to -70 latitudes. The extra 12.5 deg in the NH must have some effect.

My calculations show that the area from 82.5N to 90N encompasses about 1% of the total NH area while the area from 70S to 90S encompasses about 6% of the total SH area. As I recall the various temperature sets use extrapolated values for those without measurement. If my recollection is correct, would not the extrapolations have to be in large errors to cause a significant difference in global temperatures or NH to SH temperature comparisons?

I see in the SH that the temperature gradient going to the pole is small while in the NH it is steep. I suppose one could plug in some differing temperatures for the non-covered areas and look at the results just to get an idea of the potential magnitudes of differences we are talking about here.

One of the Great controversies is how the “closed shop” of scientific review for publication and funding can lead to the passage of scientific consensus into blind cul-de-sacs of scientific theory .Indeed we can cite many Nobel laureates who when questioning the ‘Paradigm” were treated with contemptuous ridicule from the “consensus club”(Alfven being a good ezample)

Thomas Gold cited the behavior of the Nasa consensus of ‘in-house peer review”as the closed herd.

Another area where it is particularly bad is in the planetary sciences where NASA made great mistakes in the way in which they set up the situation. NASA made the grave mistake not only of working with a peer review system, but one where some of the peers (in fact very influential ones) were the in-house people doing the same line of work. This established a community of planetary scientists now which was completely selected by the leading members of the herd, which was very firmly controlled, and after quite a short time, the slightest departure from the herd was absolutely cut down. Money was not there for anybody who had a slightly diverging viewpoint. The conferences ignored him, and so on. It became completely impossible to do any independent work. For all the money that has been spent, the planetary program will one day be seen to have been extraordinarily poor. The pictures are fine and some of the facts that have been obtained from the planetary exploration with spacecraft – those will stand but not much else.

This is of course human nature(egoism) as Tolstoy explains.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth, if it be such as would obliged them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

Re Hans Erren and Phlogiston.
Thanks for the memories Hans. About 10 years ago I mentioned phlogiston to illustrate how careful observations can falsify bad concepts to a college class of about 30 top grade high school grads (about 10 of these also had degrees in the arts or sciences) and not one of them knew the term (but there were three or four who thought I was referring to some sort of sore muscle liniment)—I’m sure you can appreciate why after that I didn’t even bother to mention “Caloric”.

In passing, my grade 6 class in small town northern Alberta back in the 40’s was introduced to the phlogiston and caloric concepts as part of a Socratic set-up to the old pump-the-air-out-of-the-glass-bell-jar-to-see- what-happens-to-the-burning-candle trick. The teacher was a little old nun from rural Quebec.

Ron, Hans Erren, talk about junk, people used to dismiss ideas if a major Greek philosopher didn’t think of them. For years, sunspots were thought not to exist, despite observations of them, becuase Aristotle said celestial bodies are perfect and blemishless. Just learned this reading a preview of Hoyt and Schatten’s book.

You cannot find out what a model predicted. I know. I tried. I went to the IPCC database of model results and I said: “may I please have the data that will inform the policy makers who intend to save the world from diaster?” And they said. “no you may not have the data we promised to make available.”

So, I disbelieve them and heap scorn and ridicule upon their lackeys. Seems fair. You wanna control my life, show your friggin data, answer my questions and stop pretending I dont have a right to debate your conclusions.

The global climate models used here are useful for decadal scale projections, not for year to year variability. So evaluating these simulations in the context of short term variability isn’t particularly useful. We don’t expect such simulations to predict 2010 temperatures, or whatever. If you have further questions about the paper, I encourage you to email the authors.

re 475. Judith. 150 years, lets say 1850 to 2000 is not short term variability.
You work on a climate model. Clearly before you make a change you run a baseline.
Clearly you do this. Every model that has been validated has baseline. and when
changes are made they are measured against the baseline. And if they improve the skill of the model they are accepted as changes and if they do not inprove the skill they are not accepted.
This is the methodology you use. correct?

Let’s pick hadcru observations. Monthly since 1850. Global mean surface temp. The observation
we see every month from Hadley. This is a simple metric. We see in the press in the IPCC.
So, one assumes it’s an important metric.

Now, lets pick the model you work on. Can you produce the model’s hindcast from 1850 to 2000
for the most fundamentally simple output. GMST by month from 1850 to 2000.

That’s like easy. That’s like my first slide. Hey, we got the GLOBAL AVERAGE RIGHT.

Weird that I’ve never seen that. But, you work on the model. So you have these numbers.
And so show us the numbers. It’s easy.

Meanwhile I wait for the IPCC to deny my request again to get the data.

That’s it Judith. Cite another reference and then when it is shown to be nonsense, refer the reader to the authors of the reference instead of citing some mathematics that proves (disproves) your point.

Judith, I wonder if you are aware of the falsification work lucia has been doing? She thinks she has calculated what trends it would take for how long to falsify the IPCC’s projections of future warming (those of 2 C and above). She’s had several posts on it at her blog. Can remmeber where I put the link though…

Kansas University sits on a pile of calcium carbonate, the Oread limestone, a thick and tough layer, not as weathered as the two nearby valleys. The furthest south ice age stopped about there; tarheels are soft in comparison. Hence the rock chalk.
======================================================

The global climate models used here are useful for decadal scale projections, not for year to year variability

You know, there is such discipline as mathematics. Which is summarily referred as Quinn, or servant of the science. Me, as mathematician, like to see exact mathematical proof that “climate models are useful for decadal scale projections, while not useful for year to year variability”.

Andrey
My analysis also assumes the model are not useful for year to year variability, and only tests whether the mean trends predicted are consistent with the statitistical properties of the weather we have had since the projections were made.

The initial conditions for the weather models are not correct, so you can’t predict what happens a year out.

This sort of modeling is common to fluid dynamic problems, particulate flows, heat & mass transfer in turbulent flows etc. So, we compare means and moments, not realizations.

Essentially this is true but to be exact; all models can be right within limits and some are useful. eg; Models we use in physics to describe the behaviour of atomic structures are exactly that, models. In physics, we search for the limits of these models in order to improve their performances. What we don’t do is keep going back to the beginning of the work to change the opening parameters or fundemental parameters. This is apparently what climate modelers appear to be doing.

Ie This or that model does not reflect reality, ‘never mind we can just change the current parameters to make it fit reality and then Bingo; the model is accurate’.

Lucia:
[snip]There are plenty of people here who understand that one have to field the mathematical proof that despite inability to predict yearly climate variability (in common language it is “weather”) climate models could correctly predict decadal-scale climate (numerical modeling of chaotic process converges to realistic answer on decadal scale, despite being non-realistic on year-to-year basis).

Your repeating notions that it is principally possible, is no more than wishful thinking, bordering with (self-snip). I am frustrated to the limit to see that engineering modeler argue that numerical models of ape-primitive and well physically defined processes, like fluid dynamics, being realistic only after number 10 000 attempt, and only because of constant empirical verification, stands as verification of principally unverified models of multi-dimensional non-linear chaotic system with ill-defined physics and poor parameterization of critical components, with proved deficiency of initial and border data conditions. Moreover, such models have been proved totally inadequate to explain past climate, and failed miserably in future predictions. Still you continue to argue that because some of models are useful, climate models are tried and true.

Andrey…
Erhmm… my analysis shows the IPPC AR4 projections are inconsistent with the range of underlying trends the models predicted. What I am saying is that, my analysis assumes precisely what Judy says: they aren’t intended to predict weather, but only underlying trends. Using that assumption, they aren’t doing well over the period in which the IPCC intended they would apply.

In the Sloan paper linked by Judith in #392 (and elsewhere on the board), what is interesting is that low cloud cover seems to have fallen by about 2% to 3% over the 1985 to 2005 period.

Not only has cloud cover fallen, but it actually seems to correlate closely with the solar cycle (perhaps just by chance and the opposite of Svensmark’s theory but nonetheless.)

Does anyone have the basic data which backs this up (and perhaps with a longer time series.) I’ve searched the net and gone to the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project website but it seems difficult to get a simple dataset.

It seems low cloud cover could explain a great deal of the warming from 1985 to 2005 (and might even be the smoking gun.)

How does that match up with the model’s predictions? Decreasing low cloud cover lets in more sunlight but lets more LW radiation escape at night. What does declining low cloud cover imply for the assumptions of increased water vapour with increasing GHG warming? Why does it seem to correlate with the solar cycle?

First 491 suggest you look at Lucia’s work on her blog before you jump to conclusions. She has modestly responded in 493.

Now a bit off thread although based upon a comment above about charcoal. Two themes

Man’s influence

Apart from Pielke Senior’s frequent work on land us change and its impact on regional climate, I rarely see any comment about for example:

Deforestation in Europe with first the need for wood as fuel and to build ships (Tudor period) and then the need to provide charcoal for the iron industry – 1740’s onwards. Of course here’s an object lesson for the environmental doomsayers. Technological progress with the invention of the blast furnace removed the need for charcoal and so the trees were saved and thus the planet!

WW2 and the Vietnam War. These, the first especially, should have had a noticeable impact on both human caused CO2 production and particulate emission but I have not seen any work on their impact. Perhaps the impact was too small?

Nature red in tooth and claw.

Man’s influence is always cast as bad. “We are destroying the planet”. Yet Darwinian theory would suggest that any successful species will eventually come to dominate and perhaps destroy its habitat and along the way will be exposed to threats such as natural climate variation, volcanoes, disease and the like. At various times the planet has been rendered almost dormant by glaciations yet then rebounds as a result of relative warming and teams with life of all sorts.

I am not a scientist just an interested and skeptical lurker. I am happy to be sent off thread, start a new one or be directed to better forum to discuss these issues.

496 (P. Maynard)
It’s interesting with forests in Europe – although cities sprawl, in the remaining area there is more trees than 60 yrs ago. Similarly also in North America, forests are on the increase. See here and here.

EW interesting point but note that in relation to the UK at least, compared to say 1300 AD when the land was literally covered in forst there are very few trees and in the past 60 years, tree planting has been heavily influenced by tax incentive driven monoculture of fast growing pine varieties.

you are way off base WRT to Lucia. She did a rather basic test ( Sophisticated yet basic)
The IPCC in the TAR and in AR4 projected a warming TREND of .2C per decade REGARDLESS of changes in short term GHG forcings. That’s a prediction. That’s a hypothesis.
THAT is testable. anytime any place.

Now, if you test a claim like ” the climate will warm by .2C per decade” with a small
dataset ( 74 months of data) more often than not you will FAIL to falsify the .2C per decade trend projection. And you will fail to falsify because the error is large in the short term. However, if the prediction ( .2C per decade) is high and/or /if the short term weather ( 74 months ) runs cold, then you will be able to say this:

1. We are 95% confident today that the estimate of TREND issued by the IPCC is wrong.

That is all Lucia has claimed. Here is the trend projection. Here are the observations.
Either the trend projection is wrong, or we have a cooling event that is more rare than 1 in 20.

The issue is in this climate the IPPC cannot be seen as making a error. You can have a valid theory and still make mistakes. But lately it seems like nobody wants to admit to the tiniest most inconsequential errors. They dont even want to admit that s… happens.
which is like a fundamental axiom.

Just curious… Is there any statistical implication from the fact that the observed data in this analysis is an average of averages? Is it known which of the individual measuring agencies falsify the IPCC prediction and which ones don’t?

And an unrelated question… As a possible validation step, does anyone know if the GCM’s have tried to hindcast average global temperatures on Mars and/or Venus and if so, how did they do? Is that test even possible?

Judith, this paper has gotten some coverage in the media (hardly surprising, its another L&F fiasco) and I would advise you to be aware that Svensmark has commented that they are doing something wrong. I await a full published reply, as we all should, but don’t jump to conclusions just yet:

“Terry Sloan has simply failed to understand how cosmic rays work on clouds,” he told BBC News. “He predicts much bigger effects than we would do, as between the equator and the poles, and after solar eruptions; then, because he doesn’t see those big effects, he says our story is wrong, when in fact we have plenty of evidence to support it.”

#497 and #498: the thing is logical and not surprising at all, and not only in comparison with 60 years ago but even with 200 years ago, where e.g. Italy had 30% less forests and woods.
The thing is absolutely logical: today we need not so much wood, we do not it to warm ourselves, to cook, to build ships or houses etc. as we did until XIXth century. Venice, between XVth and XVIIIth century, “destroyed” many forests in North-East Italy to build her fleets: progress can be both health and ecological-friendly, even without enviromentalists ;-)

I need to do some research but this sounds wrong since vast forests were maintained not least for the hunting pleasure of the King. I am happy if I am wrong although I think the general points made about the detection of Man’s signal still merit discussion.

508 Paul M
I think the “vast forests” you are talking about were quite a bit smaller than the word “vast” implies, For example, Epping Forest and Sherwood Forest are large wooded areas, but only a tiny fraction of even little England’s landscape. (Incidentally, Epping Forest is dark and heavily wooded, but Sherwood Forest is fairly open and lightly wooded.)

forests were maintained not least for the hunting pleasure of the King

These “forests” were not forests in the modern sense of the word but game parks. In fact this is the origin of the word forest, meaning an area set aside for the pleasure of the king. It was only later that the word forest came to mean a densely wooded area. IIRC England was largely cleared of woodland before the bronze age.

This from Realclimate, a reply from our favorite anon blogger, Tamino (we still don’t know what is field is):

“Blogs don’t serve very well for communication among scientists. Peer review does more than just protect us from being inundated with substandard work; it protects authors from their own mistakes and improves the quality of what we write.”

And that’s why, after all this time, we’re still discussing the BCP problem.

“Peer review itself is an immensely valuable avenue of communication; who among us hasn’t at some time included a phrase like “We thank an anonymous referee for comments and suggestions which dramatically improved the final manuscript”?”

Was there such a comment from Mann et al, concerning the M&M papers? I don’t think so…

“But as bad as blogs are for actual research, peer-reviewed journals are far worse for communicating with and educating the lay reader. Yet when it comes to climate science the lay public is hungry for knowledge, and many of them are eager, and well-prepared, for a level of sophistication and detail that can’t be found in lay journalism or even popular literature; An Inconvenient Truth isn’t enough.”

Here, he’s right: there wasn’t enough “truth” in the movie.

“So blogs serve an incredibly useful purpose, enabling the interested and well-educated reader to share insights with researchers who are at the cutting edge of new knowledge.”

And also to let them spew without having to talk about their own papers.

“There’s yet another aspect which features prominently when it comes to climate science. We’re in a “propaganda war” in which one of the strategies used by the forces of ignorance and greed to sabotage action, is to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”

Goes both ways, too…

“We’re not just scientists (climate or otherwise), we’re also human beings with a moral obligation to leave the next generation a world worth inheriting.”

No one doubts that.

“The blogosphere has been a primary target of the disinformation campaign; it’s the “trenches” of the propoganda war. We have to fight the enemy on this crucial battleground.

One of their strategies is to take legitimate peer-reviewed work out of context, blow it all out of proportion, or misrepresent it most falsely, to give the impression that it overthrows the reality of global warming when in fact such was never the intent or conclusion of the authors.”

Bloggers also love to gloss over certain papers, giving them more importance that they are due, simply because of their author, or place of publication. Their idea of “legitimate peer review” still hasn’t been defined.

“The Schwartz paper is a fine example of this; it doesn’t overthrow any aspect of climate science — nor does it pretend to — but it was heralded by so many as doing exactly that. In a sense, Schwartz himself was the most direct and most damaged victim of their efforts. Refuting such nonsense can’t be done in the peer-reviewed literature; no respectable journal publishes that kind of stuff and no substantial fraction of the general public would ever see it.”

“Respectable” in their eyes, right? What about Loehle or Abanah, have you discussed their papers? Have you insisted that data and codes be archived or posted?

“So, while blogs aren’t part of the machinery for legitimate scientific research, they’re an indispensible tool for communication and combating misinformation. RealClimate is the best of the best; keep up the good work.”

So blogs do have a purpose, but “peer reviewed” is better. And as long as “legitimate scientists” will fairly look at papers from both sides, and be willing to find the good and bad with both, the discussion will go on.

I’m sorry that I ranted here, but Tamino and RC both have a habit of not allowing posts from critics. Thanks Steve, for letting the “lay public” see the kinds of posts that they won’t allow.

One of the world’s leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.

In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.

Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 – the most stringent in the world – should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed”. A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the Archive website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth’s history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.

The team studied core samples taken from the bottom of the ocean, which allow C02 levels to be tracked millions of years ago. They show that when the world began to glaciate at the start of the Ice age about 35m years ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stood at about 450ppm.

“If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice – that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster – a guaranteed disaster,” Hansen told the Guardian.

At levels as high as 550ppm, the world would warm by 6C, the paper finds. Previous estimates had suggested warming would be just 3C at that point.

Hansen has long been a prominent figure in climate change science. He was one of the first to bring the crisis to the world’s attention in testimony to Congress in the 1980s.

But his relationship with the Bush administration has been frosty. In 2005 he accused the White House and Nasa of trying to censor him. He has steadily revised his analysis of the scale of the global warming and was himself one of the architects of a 450ppm target. But he told the Guardian: “I realise that was too high.”

The fundamental reason for his reassessment was what he calls “slow feedback” mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases. Ice and snow reflect sunlight but when they melt, they leave exposed ground which absorbs more heat.

As ice sheets recede, the warming effect is compounded. Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.

Hansen said that he now regards as “implausible” the view of many climate scientists that the shrinking of the ice sheets would take thousands of years. “If we follow business as usual I can’t see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of metres this century.”

The revised target is likely to prompt criticism that he is setting the bar unrealistically high. With the US administration still acting as a drag on international efforts, climate campaigners are struggling even to get a 450ppm target to stick.

Hansen said his findings were not a recipe for despair. The good news, he said, is that reserves of fossil fuels have been exaggerated, so an alternative source of energy will have to be rapidly put in place in any case. Other measure could include a moratorium on coal power stations which would bring the C02 levels to below 400ppm.

Hansen’s revised position will pile yet further pressure on Britain over plans to build a new generation of coal power stations. Last year he wrote to Gordon Brown urging him to block the first such power station; the Royal Society has made similar suggestions to the government.

We apparently are talking on different languages.
Verified software program generating random numbers can produce only random numbers. That’s what Jerry Browning was telling over and over again, for example at “Exponential growth…” tread:

WW2 and the Vietnam War. These, the first especially, should have had a noticeable impact on both human caused CO2 production and particulate emission but I have not seen any work on their impact. Perhaps the impact was too small?

I’ve seen one CO2 graph which shows a dip in CO2 production during WWII, but the temperature (see the Hadcru SST numbers without the Folland and Parker correction, it’s on this blog somewhere) carries out a brief upwards excursion of considerable force and vigour.

I think it was on Open Mind (whatever happened to the Trade Descriptions Act?) that I saw someone pointing out that anthropogenic global warming began in 1760. Has anyone seen a proposed mechanism for that? Has it not been settled that human CO2 only reached a high-enough level comparatively recently?

They show that when the world began to glaciate at the start of the Ice age about 35m years ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stood at about 450ppm. “If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice – that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster – a guaranteed disaster,” Hansen told the Guardian.

This leaves me quite puzzled. So – we have had 450 ppm, all ice thawed and everywhere hot’n’stuffy and then the glaciation started? A question No. 2 – wasn’t it usual for ALL the ice to thaw in the interglacials, human influence or not? A question No. 3 – where came that disastrous CO2 in the Tertiary from? No bad, bad humans running around burning fossil carbon…

521 (EW): at the start of the glaciations we stood at 450 ppm. There is the plausible explanation for the start of the ice ages, that they started because of Himalaya’s upthrust, causing increased weathering of rocks and thus removal of CO2 down to 200 ppm [or whatever]. In the grand scheme of things we cannot balance of the knife edge of 350 ppm forever. If we define ‘disaster’ as any change of status-quo that we don’t like, then we may have disasters left and right.

521 (Leif) Do you want to say, you heretic, that we will end up at 450-500 ppm and probably all ice melted anyway, because that’s how things always go? Oh, horror! And no amount of prayers and CO2 indulgences will change that?

In the grand scheme of things we cannot balance of the knife edge of 350 ppm forever. If we define ‘disaster’ as any change of status-quo that we don’t like, then we may have disasters left and right.

What you say is correct. It is also something that can easily be used by the warmers or any faction I suppose, for their advantage. Somebody produces a chart that shows temps used to be essentially flat, then points to any variation as disaster. All they have to do is convince the public that constant temps represent the way it should be, then show that temps are not constant right now while offering a reason, for the observed variation, that suits their purposes.

Actually, quite ingenious if you think about it: Pretend the “natural” state of the climate is one of constant conditions (clearly incorrect), then claim that variation is unnatural (clearly incorrect but matches observations).

Wombats are a burrowing marsupial whose sole purpose of existance seems to be eating roots, shoots, and leaves. Prior to the first glaciation they were 10 times the size of modern wombats, and huge roaming mobs of them turned whole forests upside down, releasing billions of tons of CO2 from the rotting forests, which raised global temperatures far higher than they are today. As wombats have such a high cellulose diet, they emit copius amounts of methane from their back passages, adding to the greenhouse warming. With all the environmental destruction the wombats had already wreaked, they found high quality food increasingly more difficult to find, incorporating lots of ground dwelling grubs and others from rotting tree trunks into their diets and raising the sulphur content, which was then mixed with the methane in their guts. The result beggars belief, as aside from the overpowering stench of the odiferous sulfurous wombat farts blanketing the Earth, the sky become quite brown as sulphur pollution reduced sunlight penetration, causing cooling to set in and the first ice soon appeared at the poles. However, due to the sheer quantity of polluting gasses already released, the world had reached a tipping point, and massive blizzards soon rushed equatorwards from both poles, snap freezing everything in their path including the giant wombats as the age of glaciers set in. Only a small pocket of wombats survived, confined to the landmass now known as Australia.

Antarctica has been glaciated over several different times in the last 500 million years when CO2 levels were much, much higher than the 350 ppm.

With continental drift, Antarctica has been drifting around the south pole for most of Cambrian period. At various times, it has been slightly off the pole and was not glaciated. At other times, it was locked together with other continents over the south pole and was glaciated.

I think any time you have a continent over one of the poles, it is going to be highly glaciated. The average temperature at the south pole is -49.5C. It is going to take a lot of warming to result in Antarctica not having 2 mile high glaciers. Greenland has a summer melt season so might be more at risk.

Forests in the past; Given the population of 100 or 200 years ago, what would be huge to them would probably not be so to us. My guess. :)

As far as the rest on trace gases; where’s the math showing the optimal level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? How many ppmv; 150? 250? 350? 450?

There is no demonstratable causal linkage been any or all of the IR absorbing/emiting gases and the anomaly trend. There is an observable linkage between water as vapor, liquid, solid and clouds regulating the weather and therefore climate. All the non-water vapor “GHG” levels in recent times have trended together. Why? You have to look at the atmosphere, hydrosphere and oxygen cycle (and other systems and variables) to get a big picture of this. Do the number of humans, their infrastructure and waste heat have an affect upon the environment? Of course. Quantifying it is the issue.

Then the question becomes; what correlation does the anomaly trend have to the physical reality of the energy levels of the planet? Certainly everyone is aware the anomaly trend is a proxy for temperature, and that proxy temperature is a proxy for energy levels. But we can’t even get there if the models don’t give us something that even remotely reflects what the anomaly and/or anomaly trend did in the past; why would we want to use it for the future. Is there some special model property that only makes it good for forcasting/projecting/predicting/guessing at the future but not the past? Seems like a detriment rather than a benefit.

My hypothesis is that 7 billion people and their infrastructure (urbanization, industrialization, technology and energy use) are responsible for 99% of whatever energy rise is going on. Not the vehicles for converting and moving energy around in the atmosphere/hydrosphere et al. Question; if I burn methane to boil water, is the methane making the room have a higher energy level, or is it the energy-laden water vapor doing so?

Judith: I appreciate your input here. I agree, we have to look at decades or multi-decades; we know short term, the weather/climate is more variable, it has to “smooth out”. As far as the models go, the simple question is: Model X, I plug in a random 10, 20, 32, 50 or 100 year period and have it tell me with what margin of error the anomaly at the end of the period and the anomaly trend over the period. For example, if I pick 1945-1974 how close do I get to an end of -.08 and a trend of +.02 and if I pick 1967-1996 how close do I get to an end of +.03 and a trend of +.35 and if I pick 1986-2005 how close do I get to an end of +.62 and a trend of +.415? This will tell me if the model is any good for even giving us an idea of what to expect.

526 (EW): yes, that is what will happen. We must wait, though, for the Himalayas to be eroded down to the size of, say, the Alps, before things are back to normal. And pray that no new mountain chain will screw things up.

531 (Leif) Another explanation is that when North America and South America joined at Panama ( abouit 2 million years ago) is cut off the ocean currents keeping the ocean heat content from being distributed and thus the poles where allowed to grow.

533 (Leif) Could be as simple as cooler water more CO2 dissolved. But your right who knows for sure. From the investigations I have done regarding temperature, solar and climate once thing is for sure that there is not one mechanism but many that changes the climate and the sun. ;)